BC Interior Salish regionalisms in CJ

[David Robertson]

These existed.

One example turned up in a letter written by a Secwepemc (or Shuswap) 
person circa 1895.  The word is spelled <htlwima> by that writer, in 
shorthand.

This means "different" so it corresponds with the widely known spellings 
<hulloima>, etc.  

The corresponding Grand Ronde form is pronounced [Xluyma].  (Capital X 
= "back X", a uvular version of the German <ch>.)

Could be a slip by the writer, except that JB Good's fascinating 1880 
dictionary of Thompson Salish & CJ, which devotes special effort to 
showing CJ as actually used (by Thompson Salish people) in the BC southern 
Interior, also has <cla-hoyma>.  

The more experience I get with these materials, the more I find that they 
really do contain good information on how folks talked Jargon.  It looks 
as though they might've said, at least sometimes, [LXuyma].  (Capital L 
= "barred l", the voiceless lateral fricative.)  

This is neat because it implies at least two BC Interior Salish groups 
replaced the "plain l" of the original CJ word with their [L], maybe a way 
of overcorrecting the pronunciation to make it more 'Indian'.  (Note that 
Thompson Salish had been losing, or had lost, its own /l/ sound by the 
late 1800's!)

And it implies these folks switched the order of the first two consonants 
in the word.  (Linguists call this "metathesis".)  As Michael Noonan has 
thorougly documented in a published article (you can find it on the 
internet too), the whole Salish family of languages is characterized by 
metathesis of consonants in word-roots.  Aert Kuipers shows many examples 
of this in his dictionary, with a Proto-Salish root like /xwan/ 
[approximately; xw = a single sound] being found now in some of the modern 
Salish languages as /naxw/.  

There are a number of regionalisms that I consistently find in the CJ of 
BC Interior Salish speakers.  Another brief example: what appears to 
be /kEmtEkst/ (capital E = schwa) for the usual <kumtux> or /kEmtEks/ "to 
know" is found zillions of times in the data I work with.  Now, a side 
effect of this variety of CJ having been written mostly in shorthand is, 
when you write this word the final <ks> often looks like the shorthand 
letter <m>!  (Especially if you're newly literate in shorthand, as most of 
these folks were.)  And it appears that some First Nations people 
developed the impression that the word should be pronounced /kEmtEm/!  
Possible supporting evidence comes from Anthony Mattina's 1987 Colville-
Okanagan dictionary, where a word of unknown origin is listed, /kmatm/, 
meaning something like "all right, all right, I understand already".  

(And Mattina's very good at finding Salish etymologies in Colville-
Okanagan, so when he says a word has an unknown source, it's likely to 
really be foreign.  For example his /t'u::l/, glossed as "beatable" 
[someone who can be beaten at a game], which I suspect goes back to 
CJ /tulu/ "to win / beat at a game".)

Enough for now.

--Dave R

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