Indian sounds in Kamloops Wawa writing

[David Robertson]

I just had a glance at a page that Mike Cleven's updated on his Chinook
website.  (Google Alert is a wonderful service).

Comparing the shorthand spellings of a number of words, probably from Le
Jeune's 1924 vocabulary, I see a number that are written with a special
letter Le Jeune invented to spell Indian sounds.  Either k' or q', or
their "rounded" versions k'w or q'w, can be spelled with this letter.
(It's his shorthand "k" letter with a little tick on the side.)

Sure enough, all of these shorthand forms correspond to known Indian
pronunciations from Oregon & elsewhere.  Here's a list.

LJ: kolan  Oregon: q'wElan
LJ: kwaten Oregon: k'watin
LJ: kho    Oregon: q'u'
LJ: khow   Oregon: k'aw
LJ: khell  Oregon: q'El

So Le Jeune was noticing these "ejective" sounds in the Chinook spoken by
people in BC.  This is among the earliest evidence we have of a clearly
Indian sound-system in CJ from that region.

Le Jeune invented this letter, I believe, a while after creating his
shorthand alphabet for Chinook in 1890.  He seems to have used this letter
quite a lot in writing 7 Salish languages (starting around 1893), which
also have this type of sound frequently.  Judging from reading Kamloops
Wawa, he pretty gradually introduced this letter into his Chinook writing.

A similar story happened with his letter for "lh" (some of you call
this "barred-L")...the voiceless "L" sound of Indian languages.  Le Jeune
started out by spelling this sound as "tl" or "kl" in many Chinook words,
but eventually started writing it with a new letter, his shorthand "L" with
a little tick next to it.  He kept "tl" for the "barred-glottalized-
lambda", which I'm not going to explain any further just now; the same
distinction is found in his Thompson Salish writing, for example.

Enough linguistics for a Friday night.  Lhush chandi-ubut, good weekend,

Klahawiam naika,

--Dave R

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