Demers, "Colombie-Britannique"

[David Robertson]

[This is a copy of a note I've sent to a scholar who asked me about the
complexity/adequacy of Chinook Jargon for expressing nuanced ideas, e.g.
those of Christianity.--Dave R.]

>From Ginette Demers, "Colombie-Britannique: les missionaires catholiques et
les activites langagieres", Meta, XLIX(3):656-668 (2004):

"On peut toutefois se demander s'il agissait d'un vehicule adequat pour
transmettre les mysteres de la Foi.  En effet, Modeste Demers deplore le
fait que le sabir** ne possede pas de participes et qu'un grand nombre de
mots aient plusieurs sens. 'Il s'ensuit, dit-il, qu'il n'est pas facile de
traduire des expressions francaises dans cette langue; il [...] faut
utiliser des paraphrases'...Quoi qu'il en soit, la rarete des commentaires
negatifs et la longue utilisation du sabir autorise a penser que, dans
l'ensemble, les missionaires le consideraient comme acceptable."  (p.658-9)

**sabir is an old synonym for (the original medieval) Lingua Franca (in the
Mediterranean)

Demers' criticism is trivial.  CJ simply works differently from French,
much the way Chinese does, in that most expressions are 'paraphrases'
rather than words.  It's come to be established by linguists that, contrary
to received ideas, the typical 'word'/basic lexical item in Chinese is two
syllables/what was previously termed 'words'.  A realistic CJ dictionary
also contains mostly 'compounds'.

I agree much more with G. Demers' final comments above.  CJ continued to be
used, and in fact heavily relied upon, because it worked well.

--Dave

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