KIWA

[David Robertson]

This is interesting, and is quite a coincidence since CJ <kiwa> is from a
Pacific NW language, Chinookan I assume.  There, it's approximately
q'ay7wa -- not close enough to the Algonquian forms cited by Yann and Alan
for any confusion to have occurred in speech.  I'd think the resemblance
between CJ kiwa & the Algonquian forms is due to the Jargon word having
been written 'in English'.

It sometimes seems easy to write a foreign word in English spelling, but
it's notoriously hard to backtrack from that spelling & determine what the
intended pronunciation was.  This general problem may have led to many of
the surprisingly Englishy pronunciations of CJ words that we discussed
last week.  The fantastic proliferation of printed CJ vocabularies made it
possible for people to learn CJ in more ways than the original face-to-
face contact.

For any linguists who are paying attention, I want to emphasize that I'm
not talking broadly about English speakers' native phonology coloring
their Jargon pronunciation (which certainly happened)--I'm pointing out
specifically how English *literacy* added an artificially heavy level of
distortion to certain people's CJ pronunciation.

--Dave R.

On Fri, 16 Jul 2004 16:42:09 -0700, Leanne Riding <riding at TIMETEMPLE.COM>
wrote:

>It's interesting that both the CJ kiwa, "crooked" and the Ojibwe giiwe
>"to return" both refer to changing direction.

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