Indian CJ pronunciation sources and a few words

[Duane Pasco]

James.....
	I regret having offended anyone.
	Actually, you've said some very good things and you may very well be  
correct about the "Lang" individual I mentioned. I hadn't thought of  
that possibility.
	I've been involved with Natives from several tribes in my seventy  
five years. I've lived in many places on the coast, Alaska, British  
Columbia and Washington. From the very beginning language has  
fascinated me and I've tried to pick up as much as I am able wherever  
life takes me.
	 I learned Chinook Jargon as a young boy in Alaska without knowing  
it was another form of speech until some years later. Even though I  
heard Denaina and Yupik I never really picked up much aside from  
phonetics and it has been a great aid for me in my attempts at  
acquiring some Tlingit, Gitk'san, S'klallam, Lashootseed, Nez Perce,  
Norwegian, Spanish and others, even Japanese and Cantonese. Mind you,  
I'm not fluent by any means in any of these forms of speech, but I  
love them all, and this fact along with my slight knowledge has  
opened many doors.
	My knowledge of street Japanese came in very handy when I was in  
Korea during the war, since all adult Koreans spoke it.
	As a child and young man, it was still possible to talk to elderly  
Native people whose first language was not English, some who had  
never been to school and their English was very broken, with hints of  
the sounds of their Native tongue. I miss that. They are all gone.
	I have the impression that you have some Tlingit ancestry. You've  
probably heard some of that, things like "L" replacing "R" and a  
barred "L" replacing "S", etc. Both of these cases were common to the  
coast at large, but rarely heard now.
	I'm rambling again. I would like to say, however that I would like  
to at some time have the opportunity of speaking with you in person  
at some point. I like your philosophy.
	Duane Pasco
P.S. As a side note, since Tlingit was mentioned, I've always  
wondered what cause the Letter "N" to replace the "L" in  
"dollar" [donna, like in thlek donna, or one dollar.] I don't know  
how to make a barred "L" on my computer, so I use "thl."
	Also, since you mention Chinook Jargon words coming into Tlingit.  
There is "goshu tai" for "bacon". Chinook Koshu, meaning pig and  
Tlingit "tai", meaning fat.
	
On Oct 2, 2007, at 11:45 AM, James Crippen wrote:

> 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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