Indian CJ pronunciation sources and a few words

[Ros’ Haruo]

On 9/29/07, Sally Thomason <thomason at umich.edu> wrote:

> But as for the pronunciation of CJ by speakers
> of Lushootseed and other languages of the area that
> have no M or N: there is indeed solid evidence that
> speakers of those languages *did* pronounce M and N
> when they were speaking CJ; there is also solid evidence
> that they replaced CJ M and N with B and D when they
> were using borrowed CJ words *when speaking
> their own native languages*.


But isn't it true that the loss of M and N in Lushootseed at the time that
CJ was in widespread use around the Sound was a recent change, and not yet
complete? My impression is that M and N continued to be pronounced as such
in certain special varieties (registers?) of Lushootseed, such as in the
speech of Raven and certain other characters in traditional/mythic stories.
Thus these allophones were not "foreign" to Lushootseed, just "restricted".
In a loose sort of analogy they might be compared to the use of the
thou/thee/thy/thine pronoun set (and even the related verb endings -(e)st
and -(e)th in current English. Most fluent, literate anglophones can say
sentences containing these forms without difficulty, say, when reading from
the King James Bible or from Shakespeare, yet few of them (apart from some
very traditional religious folk) would use these forms with any frequency in
novel utterances of their own, and many would not be able to do so
"correctly" and at a normal rate of speech even if they tried. But learning
a pidgin that had "thou" and "belong thou" would come easier to an
anglophone than one where "you" was "anata" and "your" was "på anata"...

lilEnd = haluo

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