Is {overt pronoun subject} + Verb from Indo-European?
Here’s a very simple point about the early formation of Chinook Jargon.
Image credit: Lake Forest College
1.
Is CJ’s normal grammatical word order (for Active sentences),
pronoun Subject + Verb,
due to Indo-European influence?
Obviously meaning Métis/Canadian French & English.
No other member of the Indo-European family has exerted any consistent social pressure on Chinuk Wawa.
We’re very safe inferring that the incessant, prominent French & English pattern (as in je vois and I see) was the most frequent model for this to have been based on in Jargon.
There simply aren’t very many Indigenous sentences, in ordinary speech, that include a separate personal-pronoun word as these Indo-European languages do.
And such sentences would be considered unusually emphatic in the Indigenous languages.
2.
As for CW’s grammatical word order for Stative sentences,
Verb + pronoun Subject,
I tend to infer that it could be due to some Indigenous as well as some French influence. In fact I impressionistically perceive a worldwide, crosslinguistic tendency for intransitive subjects to come later in a sentence than transitive ones do.
However, in the Salish part of CW’s parentage, such pronouns actually tend to come first in the sentence, whether it’s Active or Stative or transitive or whatever. E.g. Lower Chehalis ʔə́nc ‘(it’s) I’ is virtually always the first word out of a person’s mouth.
I’m not as sure the same is is true of Lower Chinookan, where I’m looking for instances of, for instance, < na′ika >. I’m finding it hard to search within electronic documents such as “Chinook Texts” for those freestanding pronouns. (See Footnote.) But I do have an impression that e.g. < ia′Xka > ‘he’ does tend to come first in an intransitive sentence, at least an equative copular (“be something”) expression.
So, in fact, we might suggest that Chinook Jargon’s subject-first transitive and sometimes intransitive word order (yes, that’s allowed) have as much to do with Indigenous as with Indo-European languages.
(Footnote.)
I look forward to somehow finding the time to data-process the “Chinook Texts”, creating a dictionary and modern scientific grammar description of Lower Chinookan. That language deserves vastly more attention from us linguists.
