Today’s post began as a parenthetical note, but is important enough to be its own article.

Is there some easily searchable full-text archive of historical French-Canadian newspapers that I don’t know about?

The source of the basic CW word kʰapú ‘(over)coat, jacket’ has been much discussed.

Headlined “Didn’t Understand Oath”, today’s old news clipping adds to our abundant proof that Chinuk Wawa got used a whole lot in Pacific Northwest courts.

I’ve recently come back to studying a certain tale by the Grand Ronde elder, Victoria Howard…

In my research on Chinuk Wawa, I admit it took years to come to see verbs prefixed with chaku- (literally ‘come’) as Inceptive Aspect.

A pretty famous expression in Chinook Jargon is ‘I don’t care’, commonly spelled < cultus kopa nika > in the old, English-speaker-oriented publications.

A word recorded in Grand Ronde’s creolized southern-dialect Chinuk Wawa, and nowhere else, is láwtish ‘a bickerer, argumentative person’.

This will be just a quick morsel.

UBC forestry professor Suzanne Simard, author of the book “Finding the Mother Tree”, dropped some Chinuk Wawa into her interview with Dave Davies on NPR’s “Fresh Air” program this week.