Indian CJ pronunciation sources and a few words

[duane pasco]

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 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.
	When I left Alaska at the beginning of the war and moved to Seatttle  
I liked to spend as much time as possible on the waterfront, because  
it was always possible to find old-timers, Bostons from all walks of  
life and Natives from all over the coast that liked to hang over the  
railings, looking at the action on the docks and chit chat in "Chinook".
	I think the Second world war in a way killed Chinook Jargon.  
Although in the 1970's it was still possible to find the occasional  
old timer that could talk the stuff. An eighty year old man from  
Clayoquot on Vancouver Is. and another man of approximately the same  
age from the Okanogan tribe in British Columbia were both delighted  
to find someone [myself] who could converse with them. I must confess  
that the feeling was mutual.	
	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.	
	None of these persons mentioned, myself included did not learn this  
form of speech from a book. When I told Gilbert McCleod in the late  
eighties that I was thinking of writing a Chinook Dictionary, he  
asked me  "How you Gonna spell it?"
	I never thought about it before. I answered that I didn't think it  
mattered. One could spell it with Katakana, Hirigana, the Captain  
Marvel code, or whatever, as long as the people writing it, or  
reading it understood what sound was intended to be represented by  
whatever letter,, symbol, etc.
	I ended up going pretty much by the system used by George Gibbs.
	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.
	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.
	I have since laughed off my initial reaction to his comment.
	I think it must be pretty difficult to learn Chinook, or any other  
language from a book. One must really have physical contact with a  
Native speaker, meaning not necessarily an Indian.
	Trying to ascertain the "Correct" pronunciation of Chinook Jargon is  
almost as rediculous as trying to determine the "correct" English  
pronunciation. Crocodile Dundee, Martin Luther King, James Cagney and  
Chaucer all spoke "correct" English.	
	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.

Duane Pasco
> 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
>
> To respond to the CHINOOK list, click 'REPLY ALL'.  To respond  
> privately to the sender of a message, click 'REPLY'.  Hayu masi!

To respond to the CHINOOK list, click 'REPLY ALL'.  To respond privately to the sender of a message, click 'REPLY'.  Hayu masi!