Grade-school Chinuk Wawa words?
If you were going to give a talk about Chinook Jargon at an elementary school,
What would be your shortlist of grade-school Chinuk Wawa Words?
I might for example go to the most frequently used ones.
mamuk…chako…tlap…patlach…wawa…nanich…tanas..
These plus a few concrete ones like man…tala…makmak…and some pronouns…
That would be enough to get people talking.
What do you think?
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I’d go with some natural world terms, ilihe, chok, stik, mawich; definitely naika/nsaika, maika/msaika, iaka/klaska; and make sure they can count to a hundred, so we’ve got to get pi in there as well. I think tloos/klosh (can’t remember which in KCW), masachi, and skookoom are also important adjectives.
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Thanks Vi 🙂 [the middle name of one of my daughters] Tangentially, I’m glad you mentioned “skookoom”, as someone recently came to this blog searching for скукум in Russian. Now they’ll be able to learn a bit more about the most useful words of Чинук жаргон! (One day I’ll do a blog in Jargon, in shorthand, and teach the search engines to read it. Oops, got to see about a broken glass upstairs in the kitchen…)
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