The First Record of the Carrier Language William J.

Poser
[This is a slightly modied version of a paper that appeared in volume 4 of

Working Papers in Athabaskan Linguistics ,

Alaska Native

Language Center, Fairbanks, Alaska, 2004.]

The rst record of the Carrier language is found in the journal of Alexander MacKenzie (MacKenzie 1801/1962), the leader of the party of Northwest Company men who rst crossed the continent, reaching the Pacic at Bella Coola. Most of the Carrier material recorded by MacKenzie takes the form of a vocabulary (p. 164) collected on June 22nd, 1793 while camped near what is now Alexandria reserve. These words are presumably in an Eastern Blackwater dialect, corresponding to those of the current Nazko and Red Blu bands. Here is MacKenzies Carrier vocabulary. The headwords are the words as he wrote them. These are followed by his gloss, the modern form in IPA, if discernible, and in some cases comments. nah eye /-na/ thigah hair /-tsia/ gough teeth /-u/ nenzeh nose /-nintsis/ thie head /-tsi/ dekin wood /dtn/ lah hand /-la/

kin leg /-ketn/. The modern form consists of /ke/ foot plus /tn/ stick. Either MacKenzie missed the rst syllable, or in this dialect of Carrier at this time stick was used uncompounded for leg. thoula tongue /-tsula/ zach ear /-dzoh/. MacKenzies transcription probably reects /dzx/, which is the expected earlier form of /dzoh/. dinay man /dne/ chiqoui woman Perhaps /tseku/. If this identication is correct, and if MacKenzie is correct in glossing the form as woman rather than women, it shows that the distinction between singular and plural nouns had already been lost in 1793. Most dialects of Carrier have distinct singular and plural forms only for nouns denoting people and dogs. In the Blackwater dialects, however, even this distinction has been lost, and the word that means both woman and women is /tseku/. In the other dialects woman is /tseke/, of which /tseku/ is the irregular plural. On the other hand, it is conceivable that this dialect still had the distinction between singular /tseke/ and plural /tseku/ when MacKenzie recorded it, and that MacKenzies <chiqoui> represents /tsekue/, a blend formed when a Carrier speaker started o with the plural form, then switched to the singular. zah beaver /tsa/ yezey elk /yezih/ sleing dog /li/. MacKenzies transcription presumably reects /l One might take the /. initial <sl> literally as /sl/, which occurs in the rst person singular possessive form, but in this case we would expect a nal /k/ since in all dialects the possessed stem is /lik/ or /lk/. Presumably MacKenzie would have heard the nal /k/ of a form like [sl but it is not out of the question that this form reects the 1s possessed form and k], that MacKenzie failed to hear the nal /k/. thidnu ground-hog. Unrecognizable. ground-hog is /dtni/ today. thlisitoh

iron /lztih/ This word is recognizable from the Stuart/Trembleur Lake dialect, where it meansiron, steel, metal, knife but is no longer in use in Southern dialects, including the Blackwater group, where the equivalent term is /tes/. coun re /kwn/ tou water /tu/ zeh stone /tse/ nettuny bow Perhaps /nelt/ our bows. This is currently /nelti/ and means our ries, but there is other evidence for the sound change involved (Story 1984) as well as the shift in meaning. igah arrow. Probably the verbless sentence / i ka/ it followed by arrow (which generally means rie cartridge today). nesi yes. Unrecognizable. yes is /a/ at present. thoughoud plains Perhaps /tlokt/. andezei come here. Unclear. come here is / anih/ at present. MacKenzies <andezei> may consist of / anih/ followed by something else, but the <d> remains to be accounted for. In addition to this vocabulary, MacKenzies journal contains several names of peoples and places. Since MacKenzie reports no contact with Carrier speakers prior to entering the region occupied by Blackwater speakers, these all evidently reect the Blackwater dialect group. Nagailer (p. 164), Nagailas (pl.) (p. 186) Carrier person. These probably reect /nkel-a/, with the /s/ of the second form the English plural sux. The modern term is /dakel/, which means those who go in boats on top of the water. As Goddard (1981:430) has suggested, the form recorded by MacKenzie is probably not exactly the same word but contains the prex /n/ around, in a loop in place of /da/ on top, together with the verb stem /kel/ go by boat. The nal /a/ recorded by MacKenzie is probably the human singular relativizing sux,

/n/ in the Stuart/Trembleur Lake dialect familiar from the literature, but /a/ in Southern Carrier. The modern term is a zero-nominalization. The use of a plain <l> for /l/ is notable, since Europeans generally did not know what to make of [l] but were aware that it was distinct from [l] and indicated the distinction in some manner. Unfortunately, we do not have other examples of MacKenzies transcription on the basis of which to judge, but in the much more extensive wordlist recorded by Daniel Harmon (Harmon 1820), with the Northwest Company in Carrier country from 1809-1819, although /l/ in the coda is written in various ways and not always distinguished from /l/, /l/ in the onset is almost invariably written <cl>. It is possible that MacKenzie actually heard [l], voiced from /l/ intervocalically. Atnah (p. 164) / tna/. Mackenzie uses this word in reference to Shuswap Indians. It is actually a word of more general usage, referring to any non-Athabaskan Indian. Anah-yoe Tesse (p. 207) Mackenzie uses this in reference to a river, either the Bella Coola River or one of its tributaries. The rst word may be a garbled version of / tnakoh/, the Carrier name for the Bella Coola River. Sloua-cuss-Dinais (p.198) Kluskus people. /luskztene/ or /luskzdne/. If the former, this consists of /luskz/ Kluskus Village /ten/ inhabitant and the human plural /ne/. If the it consists of /luskz/ plus /dne/ person. latter, Nascud Denee (p. 186) /nazkotene/ or /nazkodne/. The rst component is /nazko/ Nazko Village. The remainder is either /ten/ inhabitant and the human plural /ne/ or /dne/ person. Although MacKenzie was not able to transcribe very accurately, due to his lack of familiarity with the language, training in phonetics, and a standard phonetic notation, most of the words he recorded are recognizable. Indeed, they reveal a few details of the history of the language: a. His spelling of tree and leg shows that the Proto-Athabaskan velars had not yet become palatal aricates, as they soon thereafter did. b. His spelling of dog indicates that Carrier still had nasalized vowels. On the basis of comparison with the other Athabaskan languages Carrier must at some point in the past have had nasalized vowels, but it no longer does, and even records from the late nineteenth century dont show it. c. The fact that MacKenzie wrote <th> where older speakers of the current language have /ts/, as in hair, head, and tongue (but not, for some reason, stone), suggests that he heard an interdental aricate [t ]. Nowadays, older speakers contrast apico-alveolars with lamino-dentals. The distinction has been lost by younger speakers, who have merged the lamino-dentals with the apico-alveolars. The lamino-dentals were very likely once interdental, as their cognates are in some related languages.

One surprising feature of MacKenzies word list is that it gives the bare stems of the body parts: eye, hair, teeth, nose, head, hand, leg, tongue, ear. In Carrier as in the other Athabaskan languages, body parts, as well as kinship terms and a few other nouns, are inalienably possessed. The stems recorded by MacKenzie therefore never occur in isolation. MacKenzie never mentions engaging in any sort of morphological analysis, nor is there any evidence that he had any interest in linguistics, but either he extracted the stems or one of his Carrier informants had performed the same analysis on his own language and gave MacKenzie bare stems. Someone did a surprising bit of morphological analysis back in 1793.

References
Goddard, Ives (1981) Synonymy, pp. 430-431 of Margaret L. Tobey Carrier in June Helm (ed.) Handbook of North American Indians: Volume 6. Subarctic. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, pp. 413-432. Harmon, Daniel Williams (1820) A Journal of Voyages and Travels in the Interior of North America. Edited by Daniel Haskel in 1820. Allerton Book Company, New York. 1922. Mackenzie, Alexander (1801/1962) Journal of the Voyage to the Pacic. Walter Sheppe, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reprinted 1995 at New York by Dover. Story, Gillian L. (1984) Babine and Carrier Phonology: A Historically Oriented Study. Arlington, Texas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.