I love you: An old love letter, and emotions, in Chinuk Wawa
One of the most frequently asked questions! “How do you say ‘I love you’ in Chinook?”
If you go Grand Ronde style, you can say “Nayka q’at mayka”. That’s definitely romance.
In the pidgin dialects elsewhere, you’re stuck with expressions like “Nayka tiki mayka”. This has the mild disadvantage (or worse — depends on what situation you’re in) of also meaning “I want you” and “I like you”.
At least in the latter instance, you can be clearer by saying “Naika łush-təmtəm mayka”, because that expresses the less intense idea of feeling well towards somebody. It might be the way to say “I love you, man!”
My favorite, lately, is a tidbit that I saw in the field notes of John P. Harrington. (Frame 980 of reel 18, for us linguistics geeks.) Anonymizing just a little, someone in Bay Center, WA, told Harrington how his brother was once visited, probably around 1900, by a young Native woman who had a letter she needed someone to read to her. It turned out to be in Chinook Jargon. What’s nice is that we have information about what it said; in the Kamloops area, we hear of young people passing each other notes in Chinuk pipa shorthand, which I infer were juicy because they were spoken of disapprovingly — but we don’t have those notes.
This Bay Center note is remembered partially, as having contained expressive words written as follows:
Sugar tumtum nika tumtum
(Harrington gives a translation of this, “My heart is sugar heart”, which serves okay.) All you need to know to prove that these were effective words is this:
The girl was barefooted and held her big toe grasped in her hand while he read her the letter, it gave her such a thrill.
Sugar tumtum, there you go. That’s your tip of the day: when you write a love note, express your own feelings.
Chinuk Wawa is very good for this, you know why? Because there’s this uber-flexible expression “______ təmtəm”, which lets you say that your heart is “_______”…anything you feel. I’ve seen emotions described in Jargon that were as varied as “kapshwala təmtəm” (greedy = stealing-hearted), “sax̣ali təmtəm” (conceited/arrogant = high-hearted), and “skukum təmtəm” (brave = strong-hearted).
These are real examples, although I’m noticing that the existing Chinuk Wawa dictionaries don’t make it easy to track down examples of this expression. The Grand Ronde dictionary doesn’t break out any examples of it under the entry təmtəm. Samuel V. Johnson’s dissertation does — but just a few. My dictionary of Kamloops-area Jargon as written by Aboriginal people in shorthand collects all the examples I have; it’s just not published yet. But use your creativity!
So how will you express your feelings, Chinook Jargon speakers of 2015? 🙂
Publish, publish, publish your Kamloops variant dictionary, please, I entreat you with delet tumtum. But then, you will need some way to publish it… Last I heard someone had a chinukpipa font in the works was a year back, but they never wrote back to me. Any word on that?
I like tiqex/tiki as it fits more in line with Chinese norms, “I like you”. For a warmer and less romantic expression in Chinese, in our family at least, we would say, “I’m thinking about/missing you.” So maybe this renders to “Alta naika haiyu-chako-kumtuks maika”? Although that certainly feels more distant an expression in wawa than the corresponding connotation in Chinese… I’d love to hear more of what you discover of this sort of thing from Cantonese pioneer sources, and the potential cultural differences of deployment.
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Your cultural take on this is great to read, and it’s spot on. Because another expression in Jargon that shows deep emotion is pretty much what you came up with. It’s a variant form of the good ol’ “kumtux” that they write at Grand Ronde as kímtəks “to feel deeply about; regard with respect”, which in my understanding can amount to “missing” someone. (An example sentence from an elder speaker is na łatwa bət nay kiiimtəks mayka, kwansəm na kiiimtəks mayka “I’m leaving but you will definitely be in my thoughts, I’ll always be thinking of you.”) It’s not restricted to Grand Ronde, incidentally, if you accept the evidence from James G. Swan’s entertaining 1857 memoir “The Northwest Coast: Or, Three Years’ Residence in Washington Territory”, where his vocabulary-list of Jargon on page 416 presents 2 separate words: cumʹtux “to know, to understand” versus caim-tux or kaim-tux “I know or did understand” — it looks like the same emphatic form again, to me. Swan was at Shoalwater Bay, close to Bay Center where the “sugar tumtum” story comes from; as a matter of fact unsubstantiated local lore says he fathered an illegitimate child there, so maybe he was giving the ladies the ol’ sugar tumtum.
I’m talking with a couple of outfits that may want to publish my Kamloops Chinuk Wawa dictionary. (And grammar. And texts.) It just takes time, ugh!
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Mm, and someone who can read the Cantonese variant of Chinese writing will have to do their dissertation on contact-language use by the southern Chinese immigrants in the West. Surely there are letters, diaries, memoirs, newspapers…All of them as inaccessible to me as the shorthand Chinook was to previous scholars!
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I can read Chinese text, and sort of fake it with converting the bumpkin Mandarin in my noodle into Taishanesque phonemes… Most of the documents from the Qing dynasty pioneers (in lower states) that I have seen write in literary language anyway. That is, where written Chinese is concerned, aside from phonetic transcriptions, dialect is mostly moot until circa 1912. But it would be spiffing to come across something Chinukwawa transcribed into Sinogram characters.
Have you encountered any materials in Chinese text in the area, perhaps yet unexamined? Where might old documents and texts be kept that one might search for this sort of thing, especially online? I imagine somewhere there was at least someone who published a CW glossary in a Chinese newspaper or letter back home…
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