spakram; Curtis; CJ etymological dictionary

[David Robertson]

Naika tlus tilikom Anthony, 

Thanks for your acute observations.  

You may be right about "spakram" being originally Coast Salish; it's good 
to be aware of the various patterns of contact.

Curtis does seem like a really useful resource.  I've only glanced at his 
stuff so far, but for example there's a good deal of Lower Chehalis.  
That's a language that's hard to find information on!

Finally, you bring up a desideratum I'd mentioned to several people lately: 
An etymological dictionary of Jargon.  I imagine that sounds totally crazy 
to some people--a language with such a brief history, having histories 
behind its words?!  

But this is one pidgin/creole that took words from an unusually broad range 
of languages.  And I think because of that, we can learn a heck of a lot 
about pidginization by establishing the closest forms for each Jargon word 
in the source languages.  

Then we might get a good picture of which word types tended to get picked 
from each language--by this I mean, were they particles, or onomatopeic 
forms, or middle-voice verbs, or what?  Grammatical notes on the source 
language will have to be included in each entry.

Some work like this has been done on the Chinookan component of Jargon (see 
Henry Zenk & Tony Johnson, George Lang, etc.).  It's contributed towards an 
idea of how Chinookan speakers and others identified "words" to pull out & 
use in Jargon.  Now imagine learning the equivalent information about the 
Salish, Kalapuyan, Sahaptin, Indo-European, Wakashan et al. parts of 
Jargon.  And how these may have differed through time, space and source-
language dialects.

Note that Sally Thomason and Zvjezdana Vrzic have done nice work on the 
sources of Jargon structures beyond the word-level: Word order, negation, 
etc.  And some writers have looked at the relative percentages of 
vocabulary that each source language contributed to CJ.  But, in spite of 
the enormous amount of data in existence on Jargon vocabulary, a thorough 
etymological analysis remains to be done.

Since I've been getting experience making a Jargon dictionary out of the 
Indigenous shorthand texts, I'm eager to move on to an etymological 
project.  It should be a team effort.  Henry, Tony, Sam Johnson, Sally, and 
Francisc, you all have personal CJ dictionary files of one sort or 
another...

--Dave

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