Nater 2020 on Mackenzie 1793, and me on the lack of a pidgin
Nater, Hank. 2020. Old records of three contiguous Pacific Northwest languages. Anthropological Linguistics 62(2):183-191.
Hats off to Nater for doing the very hard work of scientifically re-examining some unscientifically recorded early data on Pacific NW languages!
Image credit: Anthropological Linguistics
In the article I’m talking about, Nater delves into Alexander Mackenzie’s 1793 records of making first contact with speakers of:
- Dakelh (a.k.a. Carrier; Athabaskan family)
- Secwepemctsín (a.k.a. Shuswap; Salish family)
- Nuxalk (a.k.a. Bella Coola; also Salish family)
In harmony with the massive data I’ve presented on this website about the question, there are no traces of Chinook Jargon or any other pidgin or trade language in Mackenzie’s data. That’s one reason I’m writing today’s blog post.
(See my writing about “Nootka Jargon” and related subjects. I make a strong case that Chinook Jargon didn’t exist until about 1794, down on the Columbia River.)
Had such an easily-acquired idiom existed, a Euro-Canadian would certainly have used it and told the world about it.
Instead, Mackenzie, like your average fur-trade-era explorer Drifter, labored to learn even a few words of each tribal language that he encountered. Even with such a limited goal, mistakes were of course made due to the huge communication gap between cultures newly encountering each other.
(Wish humans luck if extraterrestrial aliens ever arrive! I’m one linguist who says the initial interactions would be baffling as all get out.)
- For example, when Mackenzie shows us words for ‘iron’, it turns out he’s actually learning how to say ‘knife’ in Dakelh and Secwepemctsín.
- And his words for — supposedly — ‘yes’ and ‘come here’ in those languages remain puzzles.
- His Nuxalk ‘house’ is actually ‘boards’, which as you know were the prominent traditional Indigenous house siding.
- His Nuxalk ‘water’ is actually ‘bucket’!
- Other examples are pointed out by Nater.
Another kind of misunderstanding: foreign phonology. In the Dakelh & Secwepemc word lists, Mackenzie’s < i > or < gi > at the beginning of word looks to me like a mother-tongue speaker of an Indo-European language “winding up” (to use an American baseball metaphor) to pronounce a difficult consonant cluster.
- In the Dakelh instance, this would indicate that Mackenzie heard a /k’/ sound as being two sounds!
- In Secwepemctsín, we’re talking about the un-English sequences /sx/ and /ckʷ/.
(Referring to that one, Nater on page 186 suggests instead that what’s going on might have been someone introducing a word with English “(this) is”, which I find improbable since this was first contact.) - In Nuxalk, we’re dealing with a /st’xʷ/ sequence.
Nater, on pages 186-187, is correct that Secwepemctsín < smosledgensk > for ‘woman’ does fascinatingly reflect the Proto-Salish stem *smuɬac, which is unknown in modern Secwepemctsín. I would add that its ending < -ensk > may indicate possesion in a recognizably Secwepemctsín form, -n-s-kuxʷ ‘our (exclusive)’, reflecting Proto-Salish *-n ‘Inalienably Possessed’ in my analysis. So, ‘our (Secwépemc men’s) wives (not yours, White guy)’!
Well, I hope my additional comments have added even more value to Nater’s 2020 publication. I think I’ve shown you how incredibly unlikely it would’ve been for a trading language to have already been in existence when Mackenzie came overland to the BC coast in 1793 — in the same era when many maritime visitors’ records also indicate how hard it was to communicate between Indigenous and European people.
