Much of California ethnographic and documentary linguistic history has been shaped by the concept of the “tribelet.” The original formulation of this concept (Kroeber 1932) had been based in large part on ethnography of the Pomo, and especially the Kashaya Pomo (Barrett 1908). Lightfoot claims that Kroeber must have been “positively giddy” with just how well the Kashaya social organization would have meshed with his theory of the tribelet:
The Kashaya people spoke a single language, recognized an overarching “tribal” political structure, could point to the boundaries of a well-defined territory, and continued to embrace many cultural practices that outsiders would clearly identify as “Indian.” (Lightfoot 2005:228)
Lightfoot suggests Kroeber’s evaluated those California tribes which were in areas under the influence of the Spanish missions—the so-called “missionized” tribes—were effectively “ethnographically extinct,” that is, Kroeber did not consider them worthy of study. Whatever his motivations, the concept of the highly local tribelet organization and the divide between the Spanish and Russian frontiers aligned to give an impression of a stark border between Pomoan-speaking peoples and the Coast Miwok. In Kroeber’s map of “Indian survivors” at the turn of the century (reproduced as (Lightfoot 2005:224), a thick black line cleaves the Pomo areas from the Coast Miwok and Bodega Miwok.
This characterization of localized California linguistic groups as highly localized and relatively autonomous polities has had a long life in academia: Heizer (1980) argues that most pre-contact native Californians lived out their lives within a very limited geographical area—perhaps on the scale of ten-to-fifteen square miles. He suggests that the social networks of Native Californians would have been quite small: they would have had, he claims, regular contact with no more than a few hundred people in total.
It is difficult at best to reconstruct linguistic contact in this area before written accounts. What is certain, however, is that there was some degree of sustained contact between these two groups in the wake of contact with Europeans.
In this paper I shall attempt to provide context and explication of a singular trace of the relatively brief period language contact between Bodega Miwok and Kashaya Pomo (and to a lesser extent Southern Pomo) was constant, intimate, and sustained. This period was the period of the Russian presence in coastal California: a presence that spanned from 1812 to 1848, affecting an area stretching from the immediate vicinity of Fort Ross itself to Bodega Bay further south.
@Endnote 1.
Many of the earliest records of Native American languages consist only of wordlists. [@ cite more examples than K doc.?] As recently as the 1960s, standardized wordlists were being used [@ cite survey fieldwork instrument] as documentary instruments for Indian languages in California. The limitations of a primarily lexical approach are many: while they may contain important evidence regarding morphology and phonology (of importance to historical comparison), they reveal little if anything about syntax or discourse practices. What then can be gleaned from a mere list of translated words?
One useful approach is to study the linguistic context in which the document came to exist. Documenting a language of which one is not a native speaker is a labor-intensive process. Upon encountering a historical document whose primary raison d’être appears to be philological in nature, it is helpful to step back and try to consider that document in historical context. Why was it created? What purpose was it intended to serve? Who participated in its creation, and why were they in a position to do so?
The multilingual Kostromitinov vocabulary of 1833 provides a glimpse into life at Fort Ross and the surrounding region, shedding light on the interactions of several cultures: Kashaya Pomo, Bodega Miwok, Russian, Native Alaskan immigrants, and to a lesser other Pomoan peoples. I shall begin by summarizing the historical forces that shaped the social and economic world at Ross and its vicinity. Reference will be made to modern archaeological research as well as to contemporary European and Kashaya accounts of life at Ross. This historical content will be interspersed throughout with discussion relevant terms from the document. Against this backdrop, I will describe the Kostromitinov document itself, tracing its path from Ross into modern linguistic scholarship. I shall then present a complete digital transcription, analyzing the lexical and linguistic clues that help to situate it within the milieu of its origins.
Oswalt (@cite ) translates Herman James’ term for the Russians and Aleuts who founded Fort Ross ʔahqʰa yów ʔbakʰe yacʰma as “The Undersea People,” [ʔahqʰa ‘water’ yów ‘below’ ʔbakʰe ‘from’ yacʰma ‘people’]. He infers that this may derive from the way a ship would have appeared to rise above the horizon from land, which would have been an unfamiliar phenomenon to the Kashaya.
The term appears in many of the oral histories recorded in the Kashaya Texts (Oswalt 1964), including #62: “The Suicide of a Wife”:
[@ complete gloss]
maʔú pʰala kʰe ka·kánʔ to dic̓i·du mu pʰala ʔihmi tí· cadu-. mu ṭ̓o ʔahqʰa yów ʔbakʰe yacʰma pʰiloloʔmeʔ- mi·meʔ-.
This, too, my grandmother told me of what she saw herself. That was at a time when the undersea people had come up [from the ocean].
(Amazingly, the tales told by Herman James in the Kashaya Texts were reported to him from a witness of the first contact. The grandmother he refers to was Lukaria Aipau Myers (James 1972). Thus the Kashaya accounts, given from Myers to James to Oswalt, are no less direct than the Wrangell’s reports are to modern readers.)
A very similar term appears in the Kostromitinov document: Ахкебакеа «axkebakea» p.249.15 This term should probably be parsed ʔahqʰa bakʰe=yya water from=PL ‘the people from the water.’
The Russian experiment in colonizing the Northwest coast of California, though it lasted only from 1812 to 1841, had a lasting influence on the peoples, societies, and languages of the region. A brief historical background will provide a keys to understanding the complex and changing society that evolved in Russian California.
In 1799 Tsar Paul I granted the Russian-American Company a charter which gave the joint-stock company a monopoly on Russian interests in the northwestern coast of America. The Company’s motivations were dichotomous. One one hand, it was a mercantile organization: its stockholders expected the Company’s activities to turn a profit. On the other hand, it functioned as a political and military extension of the Tsarist government: high-level naval officers such as Baron Ferdinand Wrangell were appointed to leadership positions. Given the slow rate of communication in those days, the leadership had considerable influence as representatives of the Russian Empire with other nations (Spain, then Mexico, then the United States). [@cite lightfoot]
The Company’s settlements from Alaska to California were arranged into administrative “Counters,” or regions. As populations in the northern Counters such as Novoarkhangelsk (modern Sitka) grew, demands on the Company to provide for the inhabitants increased. This was one of the original motivations for the foundation of the southernmost Counter, which would come to be known as Counter Ross: the Company hoped to begin large-scale farming in the California’s more temperate climate to provide for the northern settlements.
Ferdinand Wrangell, manager of the Russian-America Company, visited the Ross Counter in 1833. He describes traveling from the anchorage at Bodega bay (which the Russians called Port Rumiantsev) to the fort in an armed expedition which included "7 Russians, 2 Iakuts, 6 Aleuts, 4 Indian vaqueros and 2 interpreters" (Pierce and Sadouski 1980:34) [@ do I cite the translator or the editor?]. Wrangell notes that the vaqueros were Indians hired for “riding and to guard the herds of horses and livestock.” As for the interpreters, it is difficult to determine the languages they would have been interpreting, but given that the Native Alaskans and Russians were already conversant, it seems quite possible that the interpreters would have translated from Miwok to a Pomoan language, either Kashaya or Southern Pomo.
Somewhat later Wrangell describes the group as an “army of five nations”—suggesting that the vaqueros and the interpreters spoke different languages. (Wrangell and Baer 1839:35 [1980]) It may be assumed that the interpreters themselves were Pomo speakers.
The administrative Counter Ross was headquartered
Despite determined and repeated attempts at agriculture, Counter Ross would operate at a loss throughout its history. In one report to the Company headquarters in Irkutsk, the governor of Russian America, Baron Wrangell , reported profits 43,858 roubles versus expenditures of 224,171 roubles over a four-year period. (Four 1993:243) Many schemes for increasing profitability were implemented: while the fur trade was initially very profitable, the local sea otters were quickly hunted out by the highly effective Aleut and Chugach [@ right names?] who accompanied the Russians. Other ventures included ship building (California woods used were “cut with sap” and the three ships built were mothballed in a few years); sheep raising (the wool was course and couldn’t compete with blankets from enforced labor at the missions); and even brick making (it was too difficult to produce sufficient quantities for shipment to Alaska). [@ cite Lightfoot]
The administrative seat of Counter Ross, which would become known in English as Fort Ross, was founded in 1812. That there was a historical relationship between Fort Ross and the Kashaya Pomo people is often commented upon in several works relating to the Pomoan languages and in archaeological literature (Barrett 1908, Lightfoot 2005), but there is much that can be revealed about the nature and historical trajectory of that relationship which requires deeper historical and social understanding of the whole region.
This included a region which was con
These industrial endeavors left marks on both the Kashaya and Bodega Miwok languages.
“The road from Ross to Bodega runs half through the forest and over the mountains; farther on it follows the coast and then passes through the treeless steppes.”
The social arrangement in the direct vicinity of Ross has been extensively documented and researched, and provides numerous bases for linking the linguistic evidence in the Kostromitinov document with social history.
A French visitor was able to detect even from afar that the social world at Ross had at least three subdivisions: “Outside the compound are lined up or scattered the pretty little houses of sixty Russian colonists, the flat huts of eighty Kodiaks, and the conical huts of as many native Indians.”
[@ expand]
Osborn (1997) summarizes available statistics on the demographic makeup of Fort Ross at four points in its history: the 1820 and 1821 censuses by the Russian-American Company, and the 1836 and 1838 censuses by the visiting Russian Orthodox priest Veniaminov. While somewhat limited in detail, these data do strongly suggest that a multicultural environment obtained throughout the Ross Counter. In such a social environment, as shall be detailed below, language contact was surely ubiquitous and omnipresent.
There were secular censuses taken by Kuskov—the first administrator of Ross—in 1820 and 1821, and Russian Orthodox Confessionals taken by the visiting priest Veniaminov in 1836 and 1838. (Istomin 1992, Osbourne 1997, Lightfoot 2005) These describe the patterns of marriage amongst the peoples at Ross.
The social makeup of the Kodiak and
mixed couples
preserved monolingual households
some Kodiaks married or cohabited with Kashaya
[@ expand on marriage practices]
The list of languages known to have been spoken in or within at Fort Ross is considerable. Kashaya (Southwest Pomo), Bodega Miwok, Russian, Aleut, Chugach, German, French, Chinook Jargon (briefly).
Why was this curious multilingual document created? How reliable are its contents for the purposes of evaluating the mid-19th-century synchronic states of the Kashaya and Bodega Miwok languages?
The Kostromitinov Document provides a unique insight into the early days of contact between European and Native American peoples. It is quadrilingual, containing four-hundred and twenty terms in German, Russian, Kashaya Pomo, and Bodega Miwok. The column labels are as follows (transliteration is given in «guillemets»):
The Russian name for the Kashaya Pomo (and perhaps the Southern Pomo as well), «», means ‘northerners.’ This is due to the fact that the initial landing site of the Russians was Bodega, and not Ross itself. @@ Thus the northern Indians, who would have been known to the local Miwok to have spoken a distinct language, came to be referred to the Russians by respect to their location.
All of the content, with the exception of the German, was written in the Cyrillic alphabet. The first two columns are of course German and Russian. It is likely that the German would have been
Peter Stepanovich Kostromitinov arrived in Novoarkhangelsk in 1827. the fourth of five administrators at Fort Ross.
That the vocabulary was intended as a sort of prototype phrase book for officers in the Ross Counter can be inferred from both its contents and Wrangell’s commentary.
The Kostromitinov document moved along a circuitous path into Americanist linguistics.
It is not known whether the autograph copy of the Kostromitinov vocabulary survives.
While its importance for Americanist linguistics has long been recognized, its original contents have not been readily accessible to scholars. The present work includes a complete transcription of the document into a modern digital form, allowing for comparison between the original orthographies and their modern correlates.
This document, which was obtained as a scan, is a reproduction of an 1839 publication from the Russian Academy of Sciences. The publication contains an account of the
For the current study this document was digitized in its entirety. All Russian text, as well as Cyrillic transcriptions of Kashaya and Bodega Miwok has been transcribed in the original pre-reform orthography. It is possible that Kostromitinov was using Cyrillic orthography in a non-standard fashion in an attempt to capture phonetic distinctions in Kashaya that were not part of his Russian.
The contemporary background information as to the document’s creation and purpose will also be considered. This material helps to evaluate the linguistic reliability of the contents of the document.
It is hoped that circulation of this commentary, together with the digitized version of the document, might result in further analysis of the historical value of its contents, especially for the material in Bodega Miwok, a language with which the present author is less familiar than Kashaya Pomo.@ Naturally, painstaking transcriptions of this sort are also very error-prone, and wider exposure may result in improvements in accuracy
.
Powers edited the volume (Tribes of California) which for many years remained the most accessible version of the Kostromitinov vocabulary. But the editor of that content was not Powers himself: rather, it was one F.L.O. Roehrig, of Cornell, who transcribed and transliterated the Von Baer and Helmersen recension of both languages from the original Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. Given that Powers edited most of the vocabularies in that work, it is not clear why his editor, John Wesley Powell, would have outsourced the editing of the Kostromitinov document to Roehrig, unless the original was simply inaccessible to Powers. (There is no mention of this issue in the published correspondence between Powers and Powell (1975).)
Roehrig’s version appeared in Powers 1877 with English glosses (either from German or Russian, or perhaps both), but crucial changes in presentation were made. Most importantly—presumably so as to be in keeping with the format of other vocabularies Powers was editing together—the vocabulary was split into two distinct sections. The first, grouped together with other Pomoan languages, is labeled “Chwachamaju” — a term apparently has no modern correlate (Oswalt 1964:9).
In any case, while Roehrig’s transliterations as they appeared in (Powers 1877) are fairly consistent, he reordered the rows of Kostromitinov’s original document, on a rather ad-hoc semantic basis (for instance, he grouped all verbs together). For the separate Kashaya section of the document (labeled with the mysterious term “Chwachamaju”) and it is this reordered rendering which passed into the linguistic literature.
It is an interesting question whether the primary modern linguists who worked on each of these languages, Callaghan for Miwok and Oswalt for Kashaya, were relying on the earlier Cyrillic content or Roerig’s transliterations. Both refer to the Beiträge zur Kenntnis, but it is not clear whether they are referring directly to the original or secondarily to the reference in Powers. It is possible that neither considered (or was able to obtain a copy of) the original Cyrillic contents.
Callaghan (1970) has two references to Kostromitinov, one for the form Амооко «amooko» ‘stepmother’ K246.16 which she identifies with ʔamóoko, ‘aunt.’ The other is
In 1974 Robert Heizer and Fred Stross published a translation into English from German of part of Wrangell’s report. This translation included as an appendix a reproduction of the “Olamentke” (Bodega Miwok) vocabulary from Powers. However, it did not include Baer’s comments on
«describe the contents of the document»
It seems probable that (Baer and Helmersen 1839:234-254) is the publication from which all references to the document in modern linguistic scholarship ultimately derive. The readings here were based firstly on a digital scan of a , The vocabulary section of the document consists of twenty pages with four column and approximately twenty rows per page. There are a total of 421 entries. There is just one incomplete row: p. 242, row 10 contains the Bodega Miwok Очонъ-дага «očon″-daga» ‘bladder’, but the Kashaya column is empty.
(As I am not familiar enough with the phonology of any Miwok language to evaluate Kostromitinov’s renderings of that language, so the following will concentrate on his transcriptions of Kashaya Pomo.)
In general, Kostromitinov seems to have been a conscientious and are accurate transcriber. Where particular features of Kashaya phonology are ignored, the omission is usually consistent. For instance, Kostromitinov in most cases omits initial /h/. Thus ¶241.1 о́-о́ «ó-ó» ‘Zähne; Зубы (tooth)’ represents Kashaya hoʔó ‘tooth, teeth’.
In general, Kostromitinov is a careful and observant transcriber. Where possible, he uses available aspects of the Cyrillic alphabet in order even to represent phonetic distinctions which do not exist in that language. The Kashaya voiceless ejective aspirate /s̓/ (which sometimes surfaces as an affricate, IPA /c̓/) is consistently transcribed with ц «c», in contrast to the voiceless alveolar affricate /s/, transcribed with Cyrillic с «s». Similarly Ко̀сса «kòssa» for q̓ohsa ‘elbow’.
Interestingly, Kostromitinov makes use of an innovation to the Cyrillic alphabet, Cyrillic letter Ka with a diagonal stroke: Ԟ or ԟ. He uses these characters (sometimes difficult distinguish from Latin K, even in the original), fairly consistently as it turns out, to distinguish uvular from velar stops in Kashaya.
@ examples
Thus it is clear that Kostromitinov was cognizant of the velar/uvular distinction. Probably he would have learned of it before coming to Ross—he would have previously encountered American Native languages with phonemic /q/. (Kostromitinov’s sister-in-law was herself Aleut; his nephew was an interpreter between Russian Tlingit (Kan 2010:3).)
The remaining close matches are clear borrowings from either Russian or Spanish. (References are given to Page and Line number
250.20 Каваю ‘Horse’ 250.20 Каваю ‘Horse’
251.4 Каина «Kaina» ‘Hen’ 251.4 Каина «Kaina» ‘Hen’
251.17 Камзулу «Kamzulu» ‘Jacket’ 251.17 Камзуль «Kamzul′» ‘Jacket’
251.2 Кочина «Kočyna» ‘Pig’ 251.2 Кочына «Kočyna» ‘Pig’
251.10 Чавыкъ ‘Iron’ 251.10 Чавукъ ‘Iron’
A compelling question is whether this document might shed some light on the pre-contact relationship between Pomoan and Miwok. Of the 421 rows in the original document, seven words which are likely to be shared between the two languages were found, only two of which could conceivably have had a pre-contact origin.
239.2 Пуумо ‘whale’ 239.2 Пуумо ‘whale’
It seems at least conceivable that there could be a relationship between
236.18 Кале ‘tree’ 248.13 Коле ‘Grass’
The documentary resources from the Fort Ross period which may shed light on the society in the Ross Counter have not been exhausted. Specifically, the writings of Ilya Voznesenskii, now held at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences, ... [@cite ]
The discovery of the use of Ԟ and ԟ in the manuscript was made at a late date (upon receiving an original copy). It is possible that other modifications of the Cyrillic alphabet as used in Veniaminov’s Cyrillic orthography for Aleut were used in the document (including ҥ, ў, х̑).
The Day of the Long Strangers
Tribal makeup of the people who ended up at Fort Ross.
Timeline
1813
Gabriel Moraga sends gifts of horses and cattle
The original Cyrillic terms from the Kostromitinov’s text have been preserved unchanged. His non-standard use of accent marks have also been left in place. Transliteration is carried out according to the International Scholarly System, which preserves a one-to-one relationship between Cyrillic and Latin. The complete table: А a. а a. Б b. б b. В v. в v. Г g. г g. Д d. д d. Е e. е e. Ё ë. ё ë. Ж ž. ж ž. З z. з z. И i. и i. Й j. й j. К k. к k. Л l. л l. М m. м m. Н n. н n. О o. о o. П p. п p. Р r. р r. С s. с s. Т t. т t. У u. у u. Ф f. ф f. Х x. х x. Ц c. ц c. Ч č. ч č. Ш š. ш š. Щ šč. щ šč. Ъ ″. ъ ″. Ы y. ы y. Ь ′. ь ′. Э è. э è. Ю ju. ю ju. Я ja. я ja. І i. і i. Ѳ f. ѳ f. Ѣ ě. ѣ ě. Ѵ i. ѵ i. Ѕ dz. ѕ dz. Ѯ ks. ѯ ks. Ѱ ps. ѱ ps. Ѡ ô. ѡ o. Ѫ ǫ. ѫ u. Ѧ ę. ѧ ja. Ѭ jǫ. ѭ ju. Ѩ ję. ѩ ja. [@ do I need this?]
Abbreviations
1 first person ; 2 second person ; 3 third person ; ABS Absolutive ; C Co ; CAUS causative ; COP copula ; CAUS causative ; CTR Contrast ; D Dis- ; DFOC defocus ; DST distributive aspect ; DUR durative aspect ; ESS essive ; FUT future ; HAB habitual aspect ; IMPRF imperfective ; INDF indefinite human indirect object ; INFV infinitive ; IMP imperative ; KT Kashaya Texts ; MA multiple agency ; ME multiple event ; NEG negative ; NOM nominalizing suffix; nominalization ; OBL oblique ; OBJ objective case suffix ; PERS. EXP. personal experience evidential ; PL plural ; QUOT quotative evidential ; RESP responsive ; RFL reflexive ; SBJ subject case ; SG singular ; V verb; vowel.