French element

[David Robertson]

Naika tlus siks, naika tiki wawa kopa maika.

Thank you for another thoughtful message, Francisc.  You have been studying
Chinuk Wawa quite a bit!

I'd like to add a few nuances (nice French loanword, eh?) to your
observations.  You wrote about the categories of French words borrowed in
CW:

>Such categories are:
>- non-Native household items (door, table, chair, plate, fork, bottle,
>etc.);
>- non-Native tools (scissors, hammer, nail, saw, plough, etc.);
>- terms connected to horse-breeding (horse colors, harness items);
>- domesticated animals of European origin (mule, sheep, pig, cock, hen);
>- culture plants of European origin (barley, oats, peas, carrot, apple);
>- Catholic religious terms.

I note that the inverse is not necessarily true, that all non-Native know-
how was represented by French or non-indigenous words in CW.  Examples
include

*the many indigenous-derived words for horse culture (which I believe
antedated European contact by at least half a century),

*gun words (not only was an indigenous word for "bow [and arrow]" extended
to mean "gun" but also indigenous terms like ~ sakwalala existed--again
perhaps guns were known via trade relationships before European contact),

*and a goodly number of religious terms (saXali tayi "God" [above-chief],
mamuk-stux "redeem/save" [make-untied], kikwEli paya "hell" [below-fire],
mashachi "sin", etc. etc.) coined using indigenous lexical resources.  It's
commonly claimed in histories of the NW that at least secondhand knowledge
of Christian practices preceded the arrival of Euro-American missionaries
by years; maybe some of these terms are of pre-contact vintage.

>BUT, there is another semantic category with plenty of French elements:
>body parts.
>Why should these words be borrowed from French? In this case there are not,
>like in the cases ennumerated before, new items that were not known before.
>(Obviously the PNW people had heads, mouthes, teeth, tongues, hands,
>fingers also before the arrival of the "voyageurs", isn't it ?!)

Here too indigenous-derived terms were commonly used.  On the one hand this
includes still-used words
for "eye", "nose", "back", "buttocks", "breasts", "leg/foot", "liver", "lung
" etc.  And on the other hand weren't there a number of indigenous-
etymology terms for body parts attested in earlier CW, which were
supplanted eventually by French words?  I don't have my references here to
check on this.

>In my limited understanding (I'm not very acquainted with the history of
>the PNW) this must be the sign of a broadening of the domain where CJ was
>used.
>(I am tempted to say "the first creolization of CJ", but probably this
>would be to much to say).
>What I want to say: probably initially CJ was a trade pidgin with a very
>restricted domain of use: just trade (and usually people don't trade heads,
>mouthes, teeth, fingers, etc.)
>When necessary, body parts could be indicated by gesture.

Of course, when necessary, trade items could also be indicated by gesture!
I'd give my eyeteeth to know more about the role and importance of gesture
in earlier CW.  I think at any rate that "signing" need not have impeded
the use of any category of words in CW; many sources seem to say that
gesture was useful for reducing ambiguity in pidgin CW speech but not
necessarily that hand signals substituted outright for words.

I can easily agree that the "Nootkan" portion of CW vocabulary, which
represents what some have seen as a pre-CW "Nootka Pidgin", is a restricted
vocabulary set -- But perhaps not so much as one would think.  There were a
pretty large number of Nootkan items recorded by those who visited western
Vancouver Island circa 1778-1800, which would have made it possible to talk
about a range of subjects beyond trade [but most of these words did not
make it into CW].  I'm not so sure that CW, from the moment it's first
clearly attested (1805 in Lewis & Clark's journals?), was equally
restricted.  For one thing, numbers of English words were already known by
Chinookans, and conditions may have been ripe for a pidgin to which one
could easily add words and still be understood.

>But I have read somewhere (probably in the Archieves of Chinook List) that
>the children of HBS employees with Native women were fluent in two
>languages: French and CW...
>Thus, a trade pidgin was forced to take the role of an everyday family
>language...
>In this case, it was necessary for CJ to enrich its vocabulary with words
>for everyday communication, including terms for body parts...
>And, taking into account the fact that from a certain moment the HBC people
>played an important role in spreading the CJ, the body parts terms borrowed
>from French got general circulation in the CJ speaking area...

The furtrader-Native marriages you mention probably did play an important
role in shaping the evolution of CW, but if as I note above there was
already a significant lexicon for some of these semantic fields, it may
have been more the case that French synonyms became better known than
indigenous ones, rather than that lacunae in the lexicon were filled with
French.

>Just thoughts from an outsider amateur.

These are very interesting thoughts, and thanks for sharing them!

--Dave R.

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