Pâquet on Demers, and me on the recency of Chinuk Wawa
Also thanks to Prof. Peter Bakker: this book excerpt…
(Image credit: AbeBooks)
…from “Fragments de l’histoire religieuse et civile de la Paroisse de Saint-Nicolas” by Etienne Théodore Pâquet ([Saint-Nicolas-de-]Lévis, QC: Mercier, 1894).
Here’s a passage describing Father, and later Monsignor, Modeste Demers’s late 1838 arrival in the Fort Vancouver and Cowlitz area, and his quick learning of Chinuk Wawa:
TRAVAUX PRÉLIMINAIRES.
M. Blanchet s’appliqua plus particulièrement au
soin des Canadiens,et M. Demers, qui avait reçu en
apanage le don des langues, s’occupa spécialement
des Sauvages. Mais pour parvenir au succès, il
lui fallait travailler d’abord à se rendre maître126
MGR DEMERS
de quelques-uns des dialectes de ces nombreuses
tribus. C’est ce qu’il fit en restant au fort Van-
couver, pendant que M. Blanchet s’éloignait. En
moins de trois mois, il put apprendre le
Tchinouks, jargon parlé ou compris par plusieurs
nations, entr’autres les Tchinouks eux-mêmes, les
habitants des environs du fort Vancouver, ceux
des Cascades, les Tlikatats,etc, assez bien pour ex-
pliquer le cathéchisme et donner des instructions
sans être obligé d’écrire ce qu’il avait à leur dire.
Dans ce court espace de temps, il traduisit, pour
leurusage, plusieurs prières, en particulier le sym-
bole des Apôtres qu’il avait adapté à un air de
cantique et qu’ils chantaient pendant le Saint-Sa-
crifice. Il s’appliqua ensuite à l’étude de la lan-
gue des Tlikatats, qui pouvait servir à deux ou
trois autres tribus, mais qui, dans la pratique,
présentait une difficulté de prononciation telle que
souvent l’on ne trouvait pas de combinaisons de
caractères pour la représenter.Avec le jargon Tchinouk, M. Demers pouvait
encore se faire comprendre des Kaous, des Nez-
percés, ou Wallawalla, des gens des Chutes, des
Dalles et des Cascades. En même temps, il pou-MGR DEMERS
127
vait se pénétrer un peu du langage de ces der-
niers, et apprendre par là-même à connaître quel-
ques mots des idiomes de ceux avec lesquels ils
étaient en contact. Quant aux autres, il fallait,
en attendant, se servir d’interprètes.
— pages 125-127
Translated into English:
PRELIMINARY WORKS.
Mr. Blanchet applied himself more particularly to
care of the [French-]Canadians, and Mr. Demers, who had received in
prerogative of the gift of tongues, busied himself especially
with the Indians. But to achieve success, he
had to work first to make himself master126
MGR DEMERS
of some of the dialects of these many
tribes. This is what he did by staying at Fort Van-
couver, while Mr. Blanchet went away. In
less than three months, he was able to learn the
Chinook jargon spoken or understood by many
nations, among others the Tchinouks themselves, the
inhabitants of the vicinity of Fort Vancouver, those
of the Cascades [Dalles area], Klickitats, etc., well enough to ex-
plain the catechism and give instructions
without having to write down what he had to tell them.
In this short space of time, he translated, for
their use, several prayers, in particular the sign
of the Apostles [the Credo] that he had adapted to a hymn
tune and that they sang during the Holy
Sacrifice. He then applied himself to the study of the
language of the Klickitats, which could serve two or
three other tribes, but which, in practice,
had a pronunciation difficulty such that
often one did not find combinations of
characters to represent it.Using Chinook jargon, Mr. Demers could
still make oneself understood by Kaous [Cowlitz?], Nez
Perce, or Walla Walla, people of Deschutes,
Dalles and Cascades. At the same time, he wasMGR DEMERS
127
able to penetrate a little of the language of the latter,
and thereby learn to know several
words of the idioms of those with whom they
were in contact. As for the rest, it was necessary,
in the meantime, to use interpreters.
What this last bit is claiming is that Demers could understand a bit of the Chinookan languages, if not of other tribal speech.
I doubt that it means he could speak Chinookan, a notoriously difficult language family. (Chinookan and Athabaskan/Dene are perhaps the languages that the fewest people have ever learned without growing up with them.)
But it’s sensible if we take it as his recognizing numerous Chinookan words, which formed a big chunk of Chinuk Wawa’s vocabulary.
Likely it also tells us that the Chinookan speakers themselves consciously simplified their mother tongue when speaking with newcomers; by the time of Demers’s arrival, they had been learning to do so for 40 years, at a conservative estimate.
And that custom of foreigner-talk must have been well entrenched.
It seems to me that Southwest Washington Salish people, too, probably simplified their speech a bit when dealing with outsiders, originally due not just to the presence of Euro-Americans, but also to a lengthy history of close interaction with Chinookans.
However, I’m not claiming that any of this is evidence for a so-called “pre-contact” existence of Chinuk Wawa.
The conditions for the emergence of a pidgin-creole language, insofar as we linguists have figured out what those are, aren’t known to have been in place prior to CW’s earliest known occurrence circa 1800.
Those conditions boil down to a sudden, sustained, intensely important contact between ethno-linguistic groups who had hitherto had no interaction going on that would’ve met all 3 criteria.
In “pre-contact” times, i.e. for let’s say 98 to 99% of their known history, Indigenous folks in this part of the Pacific Northwest presumably maintained their pattern of strengthening relationships with neighboring groups by intermarriage.
Developing a tool like a “trade language” is beside the point in those circumstances, since you normally have some kinfolk who can interpret for you.
Some folks not fluent enough to be relied on as interpreters would nonetheless be hearing and recognizing various words, sometimes simplified, in the languages of those outside their village.
There’s lots of evidence for this, in the form of varied repertoires of loan words in essentially all PNW languages.
Summing up, I infer that ancient communication patterns got enlisted and amplified once Euro-Americans showed up out here.
That “Kaous” looks to be for Cayuse (French write “ou” usually for [u:], don’t they?), who were part of the ethnic mix around Ft Vancouver (Gatschet’s 1877 Tualatin fieldnotes mention at least one individual at Grand Ronde then reputed to know the language – presumably, the original Cayuse language, before the Cayuse all adopted Nez Perce).
Re the conditions favoring a pidgin or trade language on the L Columbia or not, you make no mention of slavery and the crucial middle-man role of Chinookans in the regional slave trade. An HBC census from the 1820s has the Indigenous population at the mouth of the Col R at 40% slave. Now, I’m making no big claims here. I would just ask: how well do we really know the social conditions on the lower river at & just before contact? I believe there are many open questions yet. One on the more linguistic side: the rich development of ideophones in Chinookan, something not seen in neighboring languages (e. g. Salish, which I don’t know nearly as well as you do, Dave; please correct me if I’m wrong). Seems to me that ideophones would lend themselves uniquely well to registers of simplified Chinookan, of which there may have been a parallel rich development – whether or not amounting to an autonomous Chinookan-based contact language preceding contact. welʔ, ukuk nayka tʰubits.
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All good points, Henry. I just don’t know of comparable types of slavery elsewhere in the world that led to stable contact languages. Mass slavery as practiced for cash by Europeans of course provided the settings for numerous new languages, primarily ones we call creoles. The more individualized slavery that we see in the Northwest wouldn’t seem to set the stage for ongoing communities of foreign-language-approximating slaves to create pidgins or creoles. I have the impression that PNW slaves dealt with their linguistic surroundings much as did the non-slaves (of both high and regular class) who routinely married out of their own community — that they just learned a new language as a matter of course.
About the Chinookan ideophones: we indeed know that these became a huge part of the Jargon. Which, now that you bring this up, makes it kind of amazing that we don’t see much indication of them in the earliest recorded vocabularies. We see plenty of the highly complex native Chinookan verb forms, but no p’ə́qp’əq or híhi! Did Franchere, Ross Cox, et al. perceive these as too undignified-sounding to be included in their reported lexicons? (Much as they omitted European-derived words, and often commented on the ridiculous impression they had of CW?) Or could it be that the Chinookan sound-symbolic words only entered CW in the Fort Vancouver era, what I’m always referring to as the “early-creolized” stage? I’m gonna have to write a post investigating this, I guess, so hayu masi for the idea!
A last point, a request really: I have more than once asserted that I’ve never come across any positive claims in the ethnographic record to the effect of Chinuk Wawa or anything like it may have existed prior to the arrival of the Drifters (Euro-Americans). Could anyone reading this please activate your networks of knowledge and enlighten me if in fact there are known Indigenous oral histories about an intertribal language in use before about 1770?
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Boas’ grammar of Chinook (helped by Sapir) lists a number of what can only be interpreted as ideophones, some of which also occur as roots or stems in other (probably Penutian) languages. What is it that suggests a “development. of ideophones'” out of the blue (as I understand it), rather than simplification of borrowed words in a pidgin-like situation? (I don’t know much about Chinook(an) except for Boas’ work – I know I should read other descriptions).
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PS, thanks also, Henry, for the “Cayuse” suggestion — a logical reading in this context of the Nez Perces and Wallawallas.
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My idea (or one of my ideas) about Chinookans and slavery has to do with the Chinookans’ role as middle men in the regional slave trade. Many if not all new slaves (as opposed to ones born into the condition, where they would have grown up in their masters’s households speaking Chinookan) originated through capture from distant peoples. Slave raiders targeted children and young women, with the result that presumably many grown children and young women from distant foreign groups would have been brought into Chinookan territory, a situation that would have favored the development of a specialized foreigner-talk register, if not exactly a plantation creole. All pretty speculative, I know, but raising the point once again about how fragmentary our direct documentation is (though more could probably be done with what there is, plus new sources keep turning up).
Re not many ideophones in early fur trade sources. I haven’t done a count, but certainly there are some. Here’s one from Townsend 1836: “maica Kagh egh you love”- evidently for [mɑika kʼɑxʃ], with [kʼɑxʃ] ‘desire’ (in Kiksht). Also we must consider that what we get from the early fur co employees is indeed a trade language, a good part of which was the “Nootka Lingo” (as our friend George Lang termed it in earlier drafts of his book before changing to Nootka Jargon; I like Nootka Lingo better). Ideophones are ubiquitous in all better recorded dialects of Chinookan, so I think it would be a stretch to try to argue that they were a recent innovation in Chinookan. makwst tʰubits wəχt.
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To clarify my previous — my use of “ideophone” is reserved for sound-symbolic items, unlike Boas, who seems to group all particles together whether they’re ideophonic or not.
NB, I’d consider Townsend squarely within the Fort Vancouver period, after this earliest phase that we’ve been discussing here.
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