Blue Munk: Towards an Analysis of Causatives and the Like in Chinuk Wawa

BLUE MUNK: TOWARDS AN ANALYSIS OF CAUSATIVES AND THE LIKE IN CHTNUK WAWA THOMAS W. LARSEN Branford Price Millar Library Portland State University Chinook Jargon is a pidgin which was formerly used widely in Northwestern North America as a lingua franca among native peoples of different linguistic backgrounds as well as between native peoples and whites. The primary lexical source language was Lower Chinook, but there was also vocabulary from other native languages as well as, in later times at least, significant French and English components. One important non-Chinookan source of vocabulary was Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka). This Nootkan element, though small, includes some of the important grammatical words. Because the Nootkan words in Chinook Jargon ofien show a degree of phonological distortion not found in words from other native sources, it is believed that these Nootkan words were introduced by whites from a Nootka Jargon used for trade at Vancouver Island before the Columbia River was discovered in the late 18th century. But the question of whether or not Chinook Jargon existed in some form or another before contact with whites is still controversial. (See Thomason 1983, Zenk 1984126-31, Thomason and Kaufman 1988:256-263, Silverstein 1996: 127-130, and the references cited therein for further discussion.) When the Grand Ronde Reservation was established in Oregon in 1856, people from 15 small tribes speaking more than 9 different languages were moved onto this reservation. Zenk (1984, 1988) has shown that since the population of the community was always small, and since no one of these groups was large enough to become dominant, Chinook Jargon became the general language of the community. During the period from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, many children grew up in households where Jargon was the only or main language spoken, though probably none of them grew to maturity without also learning English. Thus, Zenk argues that Chinook Jargon was in the process of creolization at Grand Ronde until it was later supplanted by English. Zenk and Johnson worked extensively in the 19805 and 90s with the remaining elders of the community who retained a knowledge of Chinook Jargon (which they now prefer to call Chinuk Wawa); and the data used here primarily comes from their work as well as from materials collected by Melville Jacobs from two Grand Ronde community members in the 1920s and 30s (Jacobs 1936:l-19).‘ Vrzie (1999), in the course of making a case for the role of universals in Pidgin/Creole development, presents a formal analysis of certain structures in a different variety of Chinook Jargon. This variety is one that appeared in a mimeographed newspaper called Kamloops Wawa, which was published between 1891 and 1904 by a Father LeJeune of Kamloops, B.C. This newspaper contained articles in Chinook Jargon written in a unique orthography based on Duployan shorthand, and it can be interesting to try to compare some of the structures Vrzie has analyzed in the presumably more pidgin-like variety of Jargon in Kamloops Wawa with what has ' Special thanks are due to Tony Johnson. Language Project Manager, and to Henry Zenk for providing access to their published and unpublished materials on Chinuk Wawa and for helping in so many other ways. The research reported here has been generously supported by the Language Project of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. 108

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