Muir's CJ lexicon

[James Crippen]

There are two words which people have previously noted in John Muir's
CJ glossary in "Travels in Alaska" which are not apparently CJ. I just
looked at them and realized what they are. Both end in "day". This is
the allative case marker in Tlingit, written "-déi" or "-dei" in the
Revised Popular orthography, and as "-dê" or "-dè" in the Canadian
orthography.

Muir's "tucktay" glossed as "seaward" is transparently the Tlingit
"dákdei" meaning "out to sea from the shore". The "friday" glossed as
"shoreward" is a bit more problematic. For starters, there's no /f/ or
/r/ in Tlingit, so a Tlingit speaker saying such a word would be odd.
Second, the opposite of "dákdei" would be "yándei" meaning "towards
the shore from the sea". There are a couple of other terms that could
be translated as "shoreward", specifically "íkhdei" meaning "from
inland towards the shore", "(di)yíndei" meaning "downward, down a
slope", "diyáadei" meaning "across a body of water towards the
opposite shore", and "tliyáadei" meaning "over that way, farther". My
guess is that Muir heard the last one, particularly if it was
pronounced in rapid speech as two syllables "tlyáadei" instead of
three.

The meaning of "hoochenoo" has been much discussed previously. The
Tlingit name of the traditional regional group whose primary village
is Angoon (Tl. "Aangóon") is called "Xootsnoowú" (IPA /xu:tsnu:wʊ́/),
a possessive compound of "xoots" "brown bear" and "noow" "fort". So it
means "brown bear's fort".

I'm not sure Muir spoke much CJ outside of his time in Southeast
Alaska. I'd be happy to know if someone has evidence of his use of CJ
elsewhere. But based on the assumption that he did not, we can make a
good (though still weak) guess that the Tlingit people he talked to
*did not* have a CJ which was markedly different from that spoken by
e.g. the Coast Tsimshians, pace Samuel V. Johnson. He would probably
have at least mentioned the lack of /m/ in "mika" and the lack of /b/
in "Boston", I figure.

Tlingit speakers I have talked with mention their parents and/or
grandparents being fluent in CJ, and talking easily with both European
and indigenous CJ speakers from the south. Johnson's description of
the phonology of CJ loanwords in Tlingit is fairly accurate, however.
I'm writing a paper which more extensively reviews the extant CJ
loanwords in Tlingit and analyzes the borrowing phonology.

Cheers,
James

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