Taylor Ikt, Taylor Mokst, Taylor Klone and Taylor Lakit
In the [Port] Alberni [BC] Advocate of February 27th, 1914, on page 2, column 1, is an item titled “Kew Flagstaff”.
Alberni Advocate 02 27 1914 – Taylor Ikt Mokst Klone Lakit
It deals with the flagpole at Kew Gardens, London, England, which was cut from the forest near Alberni.
What primarily interests me in this article is the attribution of a late-era Chinook Jargon numerical naming system to Indians. This is a point previously unmentioned in the literature about this language and about naming, which si7am Peter Jacobs of the Squamish Nation has told me about from his country. I go into Kamloops-area use of it in my dissertation (there’s a link to that in my blog’s “pages”), and in a paper I gave in 2007.
“Taylor Ikt”, “Taylor Mokst”, “Taylor Klone” and “Taylor Lakit” are mentioned without explanation of the Jargon numerals. Local English-speaking readers of the day could be expected to recognize these words.
Notably, “One”, “Two”, “Three” and “Four” are used here to distinguish successive generations in a family from one another, similarly to English “Sr.”, “Jr.”, “III” and “IV”. (Although we don’t know the first names of each generation in this case.) This differs from the usage I’ve previously found among BC Native people, who apparently used numbers to differentiate any two or more people having identical Euro-American names.
And I’ve only seen these CJ names before with the number coming first.
So in the southern Interior, by contrast, you’d find “Iht Sho” (as I transcribe the Chinuk pipa shorthand used there) for ‘First Joe’, who was likely to be a pal rather than a son or father of “Mokst Sho” ‘Second Joe’.
I’m also struck by “stick” here. This sounds like an older sense of the word, now largely lost in Northwest English, possibly more British than North American. Would you think this use of “stick” in the Alberni paper is influenced by Chinuk Wawa, or is a sense that influenced CW, or…?
Here’s my transcription of the relevant passage:
“The old Kew Gardens staff was cut on Roger Creek over fifty years ago, and at the time was celebrated as the longest single stick in Europe. If local history can be depended on the stick was cut on Lot One, somewhere between the two towns [which two?–DDR], and the axe that brought down this pride of the forest was in the hands of Charles Taylor, “First,” or “Taylor Ikt,” as the Indians called him.
Since the time the sturdy Alberni fir stick first flung the royal banner to the breeze “Taylor Ikt” has passed to his reward, but “Taylor Mokst” still survives, a hale old man, quite able to fell the next spar, and there is a “Taylor Klone,” who can take the job when the old man tires. There is also a “Taylor Lakit,” not quite big enough to swing an axe, but certainly in line to see that Kew Gardens does not want a flag pole owing to a lack of Taylors to cut the same.”
The Shaw Dictionary makes comments on word order. “They are generally placed in much the same order as they are in the language which the speaker has been accustomed to use…” p19. Because Secwepemc is Salish and I assume Port Alberni natives were Wakashan speakers could this be the reason?
When I first read “longest stick” I thought that if stick meant tree it would have read “tallest stick”. But I am not familiar enough with the use of language back then.
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Hi Sam, thanks for your good thoughts. I also associate Port Alberni with Nuuchahnulth (Wakashan) speakers. Secwepemc and Squamish are both Salishan. But both language families are typologically quite similar, and as far as I know they’d both be likely to express number phrases in similar ways.
We can bear in mind that numbers, and in particular the differences between cardinals and ordinals, are an area often neglected in grammatical descriptions, so it might take some work to back up that idea. I’m looking at Toshihide Nakayama’s slick Nuuchahnulth (Nootka) Morphosyntax (U. of California Publications 134, pages 66-67 and 93-94), which explicitly says numerals precede nominals. Aert Kuipers’ grammar of Shuswap / Secwepemctsin (Mouton, 1974, pages 55-56) doesn’t comment on constituent order within noun phrases, but my current work on Father Le Jeune’s shorthand Shushwap Manual shows that numerals precede nouns, as in shuchilhka tlk sakraminta ‘seven sacraments’. Both sources lead me to expect an “Ikt Taylor’ word order, all things being equal.
Regardless, it’s perfectly possible in terms of linguistic anthropology for different cultural groups to put numbers to distinct uses, even in a narrowly bounded domain like personal names. So I can imagine that say the Port Alberni Native people were expressing something like “the Taylor who is the first one” &c. (which is reminiscent of ongoing arguments about Nuuchahnulth syntax), while the Salish folks might’ve been in effect calling people “First Joe”.
So we have a neat messy puzzle left here, plus new data on the territory where Chinuk Wawa number names were used. A win-win!
–David Douglas ROBERTSON, PhD
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PS, I’ve found Jargon word order to be a whole lot less variable than Shaw lets on 🙂 There’s real overall consistency from region to region and era to era. — Dave R .
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I note your question about the two towns. Port Alberni was originally two separate cities and I believe Roger Creek went between them.
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Checking Wikipedia I see that the 2 formerly separate towns were Alberni, apparently where this newspaper was based and now called “North Port”, and Port Alberni, now called “South Port” or “Uptown”. The same article give the stream’s name as Rogers Creek, ascribing this to CPR surveyor A.B. Rogers. (See also Rogers Pass.) — Dave
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I read somewhere that the ordinals were expressed by adding “-i”, e.g. ikhti, moxti, kloni … Regarding the word order it is very interesting that you have noted a stable pattern in both time and space. I had wondered that the subject-verb-object was suspiciously English. When I look at the Franz Boas Chinook Texts I see a verb-subject-object language. The placement of adverbs up front like hyack wake alki weght is not intuitive to me and seems to not follow English or French. Sometimes this varies.;)
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