Indian CJ pronunciation sources and a few words

[Sally Thomason]

I've been out of email contact for a week, but maybe
it's not too late to add a couple of comments to the
thread on Indian CJ pronunciation sources:

There's a difference between the way different Indians
pronounced Chinook Jargon itself and the way loanwords
from Chinook Jargon were pronounced when they got
"nativized" (adapted to native speakers' pronunciation)
in a borrowing language.  There's solid evidence that
many or most Indians from a variety of tribes pronounced
Chinook Jargon words in ways that violated the 
phonological patterns of their native languages.  So,
for instance, speakers of "nasal-less" languages like
Twana pronounced Chinook Jargon words with nasals; but
when they borrowed words from CJ into their own
language, they pronounced the loanwords according to
that language's rules.

And the borrowing process was often complicated, because
not all Chinook Jargon words in Native languages came
directly from Chinook Jargon.  The CJ word for "table",
for instance, was/is latab, or latap, ultimtely from
French la table.  But it turns up in at least one Salishan
language as latam; and this has to mean that it got
borrowed into that language from one of the "nasal-less"
languages (that is, one of the languages in which earlier
[m] and [n] had changed to [b] and [d], respectively), by a
correspondence rule: the borrowing speakers had to be
operating with a belief that "when those guys say [b], it
corresponds to our [m]", so they replaced the [b] with an
[m]. 

Sources of Indian CJ pronunciations aren't all readily
available.  Besides Jacobs' texts, there's Boas's short
article with phonetic transcription; there are unpublished
field notes by Harrington (Chehalis-CJ, in the Smithsonian 
archives) and Elmendorf (Twana-CJ); and one can get good
evidence, with some philological analysis, from some
Europeans' (or Euro-Americans') writings, including Horatio 
Hale's and Demers-Blanchet-St. Onge dictionary.  I listed
a bunch of sources in a 1983 article on Chinook Jargon
-- "Chinook Jargon in Areal and Historical Context" (LANGUAGE,
vol. 59).

  -- Sally Thomason

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