Indian CJ pronunciation sources and a few words

[James Crippen]

On 9/26/07, duane pasco <dpasco at earthlink.net> wrote:
> To whomever.......
>     I try not to get involved in these dialogues about Chinook Jargon.
> It drives me nuts when I read all these comments by people about
> what's the right way to pronounce Chinook Jargon.

I don't think anyone is trying to proclaim the "right" way to
pronounce the language. The reason I asked my question is because
Tlingit has a very restricted sound system that doesn't match up well
with English, and doesn't fit with Chinook Jargon too well either.
Thus, there are some very peculiar changes that have to occur for a
loanword into Tlingit. What I was asking for was simply leads to
transcriptions of "Indian" style CJ spoken by any sort of people. By
"Indian" style, I mean the style that includes a lot of sounds that
don't exist in English. That's not a "correct" way, it's just the way
that a lot of different Indians spoke it.

>     I grew up with this as a child in Alaska in the 1930's. I heard
> Athabaskans, Eskimos, Norwegians, Asians, African Americans and Red
> Necks from the south trying to express themselves with varying
> degrees of expertise.

I've been told over and over by many Tlingit elders that they used to
hear CJ spoken all the time in southeast Alaska when they were young.
It disappoints them all that they never really learned it. We still
have names all over the place from CJ, and now nobody really knows
what they mean. I hope that if I learn enough and speak it to my kids
and friends that it'll someday come back to life in Alaska.

>     All the people I just mentioned had their own regional accent and in
> some cases an occasional variant in word choice. On the whole,
> however, this was overlooked by each of the speakers and
> communicating was by and large not a problem.

Right, that's what I mean. There's no problem with all the different
dialects and variants and different ways of speaking. I'm just
particularly interested in one type of CJ because the loanwords from
CJ into Tlingit don't seem to fit well with certain other variants.

>     I guess I'm rambling, but I just want to say that academics have a
> tendency to over-anylise Chinook Jargon. It drives me nuts.

You have to remember that many of us linguists are just as fascinated
with English, with other Indian languages, and pretty much any other
language on earth. We're not over-analyzing, we're just doing what we
like to do. We dig as deep as we can into things to learn as much as
we can about them. The really unfortunate thing is when other people
take what linguists say out of context and make big issues out of it.
As a linguist, I strive to describe. I don't tell people how they
should talk. In fact, I get upset when people tell others how they
should talk. If people don't like how a certain person talks, then
just don't listen to them.

>    Several years ago a language anthropologist from Toronto by the last
> name of Lang made a comment that read something like "There is bi-
> monthly publication in Chinook Jargon published in the Seattle area
> by a couple of "amateurs...............". When I read this I thought
> "what a sophisticated college punk". He was of course referring to
> "Tenas Wawa", which I had designed with the intention of helping
> interested students by giving them material from which they could see
> conversation in Chinook.

Have you considered that he may have meant "amateur" in the
traditional sense of "unpaid and working on personal time"? That used
to be a prized designation, back when people didn't have much time to
spend on pursuits that didn't put food on the table. He may have
indeed meant it in a denigrating way, but there's always the chance
that he simply meant it to mean "not salaried", like "amateur"
athletes in the Olympics (up until a few years ago, anyway).

>      I've had people write me and ask how they can make their Chinook
> Jargon sound more "Indian". I always ask them which kind of Indian do
> they which to sound like. . A Nez Perce and a Kwakwakawakw will not
> have the same accent as a Tlingit. A member of a Lushootseed speaking
> village  would have a different accent than a S'klallam. There is no
> letter "M",  or "N" in Lushootseed, although it is a Salish language
> along with S'klallam.

Exactly. When I asked for "Indian" I meant any Indians at all. I
figured I would do the work in comparing them and trying to see how
things were different between the different speakers. I don't care if
the speech came from a Norwegian speaking to a Chinese guy, but if he
spoke CJ "like an Indian" then it means that he had a bunch of sounds
that English and French speakers wouldn't usually use. I'm not looking
to "sound like an Indian". I don't need to do so, I don't have
anything to prove. I'm already learning to speak my great
grandmother's language, and it just so happens that a number of words
in Tlingit seem to come from CJ and not directly from English or
French. So I'm looking to put things in the proper context and give
credit where it's due to the old people who spoke it.

I understand that there are a lot of dumb people out there who want to
make CJ into something it isn't, or to use it as a tool for their own
nefarious deeds. I think I probably dislike them even more than you
do. I get a kick out of the language because it's an amazing thing, it
grew up in a fantastic place in a very interesting time among
wonderful people, and it's endlessly fascinating to me. I don't have
any hidden agenda, I just want to learn more, and ideally to see it
come back to life all across its homelands.

James Crippen

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