KW #1 solves another question

[David Robertson]

Hi,

Another thing I notice in looking at that _Beaver_ article on Jargon is
this.  She shows a copy of 'the first issue' of KW.  It looks quite
different from the first issue that I've got.  She's showing what looks
like a revised & prettified version.

Both versions have basically the same text in shorthand CJ, CJ transcribed
in Le Jeune's kind-of-French way of writing, and English.  (The later
version also has it in shorthand French.)  But the transcribed CJ in the
earlier version stops partway through...while in the later version the
whole CJ text is transcribed in Roman letters.

So as it happens, only the later version shows Le Jeune's own
transcription for the word 'straight, really, very.'  I've put a few years
into trying to decide whether he was writing /dlet/ or /dret/ in his
shorthand.  (It's hard to tell his l's and r's apart sometimes, and most
Jargon sources lean to the /dlet/ side.)

But Le Jeune shows this word as /dret/.  This implies among other things:
That Native people using CJ in the Kamloops area pronounced the word this
way.  Le Jeune's spellings generally seem to be based on people's actual
usage.  And there are other reasons to think Indian people were using
the /r/ sound (despite what many popular guidebooks to CJ said); for
example, common KW words
like /redi/ 'ready,' /flawir/ 'flower,' /sistir/ 'nun,' /awr/ 'hour.'

I could go on.  (Yikes.)  But the main point here is that Jargon circa
1900 reflected its users' knowledge of whatever languages were useful in
communicating across cultural boundaries.  In the above case, English was
dominant already in the Cariboo region.  Similarly, there are numbers of
Interior Salish words in KW, because those were understood by most people
who used Jargon a lot up there.  (The I. Salish words are mostly Catholic
technical terms, and many of the priests who preached in the Cariboo had
an understanding of Salish as well as CJ.)

A secondary point is that it isn't only Grand Ronde that made significant
use of the /r/ sounds.

Cheers,

--Dave