Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin

by Otto Jespersen

XII.—§ 9. Chinook continued.

In this way something is formed that may be used as a language in spite of the scantiness of its vocabulary. But a good deal has to be expressed by the tone of the voice, the look and the gesture of the speaker. “The Indians in general,” says Hale (p. 18), “are very sparing of their gesticulations. No languages, probably, require less assistance from this source than theirs.... We frequently had occasion to observe the sudden change produced when a party of the natives, who had been conversing in their own tongue, were joined by a foreigner, with whom it was necessary to speak in the Jargon. The countenances, which had before been grave, stolid and inexpressive, were instantly lighted up with animation; the low, monotonous tone became lively and modulated; every feature was active; the head, the arms and the whole body were in motion, and every look and gesture became instinct with meaning.”

In British Columbia and in parts of Alaska this language is the prevailing medium of intercourse between the whites and the natives, and there Hale thinks that it is likely to live “for hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years to come.” The language has already the beginning of a literature: songs, mostly composed by women, who sing them to plaintive native tunes. Hale gives some lyrics and a sermon preached by Mr. Eells, who has been accustomed for many years to preach to the Indians in the Jargon and who says that he sometimes even thinks in this idiom.

Hale counted the words in this sermon, and found that to express the whole of its “historic and descriptive details, its arguments and its appeals,” only 97 different words were required, and not a single grammatical inflexion. Of these words, 65 were from Amerindian languages (46 Chinook, 17 Nootka, 2 Salish), 23 English and 7 French.

It is very instructive to go through the texts given by Hale and to compare them with the real Chinook text analysed in Boas’s Handbook of American Indian Languages (Washington, 1911, p. 666 ff.): the contrast could not be stronger between simplicity carried to the extreme point, on the one hand, and an infinite complexity and intricacy on the other. But though it must be admitted that astonishingly much can be expressed in the Jargon by its very simple and few means, a European mind, while bewildered in the entangled jumble of the Chinook language, cannot help missing a great many nuances in the Jargon, where thoughts are reduced to their simplest formula and where everything is left out that is not strictly necessary to the least exacting minds.

XII.—§ 10. Makeshift Languages.

To sum up, this Oregon trade language is to be classed together with Beach-la-mar and Pidgin-English, not perhaps as ‘bastard’ or ‘mongrel’ languages—such expressions taken from biology always convey the wrong impression that a language is an ‘organism’ and had therefore better be avoided—but rather as makeshift languages or minimum languages, means of expression which do not serve all the purposes of ordinary languages, but may be used as substitutes where fuller and better ones are not available.

The analogy between this Jargon and the makeshift languages of the East is closer than might perhaps appear at first blush, only we must make it clear to ourselves that English is in the two cases placed in exactly the inverse position. Pidgin and Beach-la-mar are essentially English learnt imperfectly by the Easterners, the Oregon Jargon is essentially Chinook learnt imperfectly by the English. Just as in the East the English not only suffered but also abetted the yellows in their corruption of the English language, so also the Amerindians met the English half-way through simplifying their own speech. If in Polynesia and China the makeshift language came to contain some Polynesian and Chinese words, they were those which the English themselves had borrowed into their own language and which the yellows therefore must think formed a legitimate part of the language they wanted to speak; and in the same way the American Jargon contains such words from the European languages as had been previously adopted by the reds. If the Jargon embraces so many French terms for the various parts of the body, one concomitant reason probably is that these names in the original Chinook language presented special difficulties through being specialized and determined by possessive affixes (my foot, for instance, is lekxeps, thy foot tāmēps, its foot lelaps, our (dual inclusive) feet tetxaps, your (dual) feet temtaps; I simplify the notation in Boas’s Handbook, p. 586), so that it was incomparably easier to take the French lepi and use it unchanged in all cases, no matter what the number, and no matter who the possessor was. The natives, who had learnt such words from the French, evidently used them to other whites under the impression that thereby they could make themselves more readily understood, and the British and American traders probably imagined them to be real Chinook; anyhow, their use meant a substantial economy of mental exertion.

The chief point I want to make, however, is with regard to grammar. In all these languages, both in the makeshift English and French of the East and in the makeshift Amerindian of the North-West, the grammatical structure has been simplified very much beyond what we find in any of the languages involved in their making, and simplified to such an extent that it may be expressed in very few words, and those nearly the same in all these languages, the chief rule being common to them all, that substantives, adjectives and verbs remain always unchanged. The vocabularies are as the poles asunder—in the East English and French, in America Chinook, etc.—but the morphology of all these languages is practically identical, because in all of them it has reached the vanishing-point. This shows conclusively that the reason of this simplicity is not the Chinese substratum or the influence of Chinese grammar, as is so often believed. Pidgin-English cannot be described, as is often done, as English with Chinese pronunciation and Chinese grammar, because in that case we should expect Beach-la-mar to be quite different from it, as the substratum there would be Melanesian, which in many ways differs from Chinese, and further we should expect the Mauritius Creole to be French with Malagasy pronunciation and Malagasy grammar, and on the other hand the Oregon trade language to be Chinook with English pronunciation and English grammar—but in none of these cases would this description tally with the obvious facts. We might just as well say that the speech of a two-year-old child in England is English with Chinese grammar, and that of the two-year-old French child is French modelled on Chinese grammar: the truth on the contrary, is that in all these seemingly so different cases the same mental factor is at work, namely, imperfect mastery of a language, which in its initial stage, in the child with its first language and in the grown-up with a second language learnt by imperfect methods, leads to a superficial knowledge of the most indispensable words, with total disregard of grammar. Often, here and there, this is combined with a wish to express more than is possible with the means at hand, and thus generates the attempts to express the inexpressible by means of those more or less ingenious and more or less comical devices, with paraphrases and figurative or circuitous designations, which we have seen first in the chapters on children’s language and now again in Beach-la-mar and its congeners.

Exactly the same characteristics are found again in the lingua geral Brazilica, which in large parts of Brazil serves as the means of communication between the whites and Indians or negroes and also between Indians of different tribes. It “possesses neither declension nor conjugation” and “places words after one another without grammatical flexion, with disregard of nuances in sentence structure, but in energetic brevity,” it is “easy of pronunciation,” with many vowels and no hard consonant groups—in all these respects it differs considerably from the original Tupí, from which it has been evolved by the Europeans.[52]