spakram; Curtis; CJ etymological dictionary

[Anthony Grant]

>>> David Robertson <ddr11 at COLUMBIA.EDU> 11/01/06 5:59 pm >>>
-Laxauyam, Dave (my responses are interlinear):

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.

-Lillooet has borrowed a greater proportion of basic vocab from other
Native languages than any othewr I know of in North America.  

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.

-There's a lot of information out there (Samuel Johnson's dissertation
is a marvellous place to start); the thing is to get it together. Most
of the words have known etymologies.  I've come across a few etymologies
by pure chance myself.  


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...

-I did an etymological  wordlist myself once, as part of my PhD work on
Creole French (I was looking at agglutinated articles); I may still have
a copy somewhere.....  -
-Anthony

--Dave

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