You, government White man, why don’t you first have a look at this Chinook writing?
The sequel to my post yesterday continues Father Le Jeune’s rant against White cynicism.
Again, look closely. The differences between what Le Jeune writes in English (pretty civilly) and his Chinook Jargon (translated below, and pretty blunt) are significant!
Kamloops Wawa #61 of 15 January 1893 (pages 9 & 10):
Ikta ilo mamuk komtaks
Why not teach
Inglish kopa tilikom pi ilo
English to the [Indian] people and not
ukuk Shinuk? = Tlus shako
this Chinook? = Come
mamuk komtaks [NULL].
and teach it!
Alta mitlait tilikom klaska
There are now people who
mamuk Shinuk pipa kanawi
are using Chinook writing all
kah kopa ukuk ilihi.
around this region.
Klaska mamuk skul kanamokst
They are studying together
kopa kanawi ilihi: kopa
at all the villages: at
Kamlups, kopa Shushwap,
Kamloops, at Shuswap Lake,
Page 10
kopa SShB, Spahomin
at St John the Baptist [North Thompson / Chu Chua], Spahomin [Douglas Lake],
Kol Watir, Liton
Coldwater, Lytton,
Krapashishin, Spisom
North Bend, Spuzzum,
Spillamshin Liluat
Spallumcheen, Lillooet,
Wiliams Lik, Skrawlich
Williams Lake, Scowlitz,
ItS…Klaksta man
etc…What person
iaka komtaks mamuk skul
is able to teach
Inglish kopa kanawi tilikom
English to all the people
kopa kanawi ka ilihi kanamokst
in every place all together?
Pus wik nsaika mamuk komtaks
If we aren’t teaching
Inglish kopa tilikom drit aiak
English to the [Indian] people right away
alta,wik na nsaika mamuk
yet, are we not
komtaks ikta kopa klaska?
teaching anything to them?
Maika taii tkop man,
You, government White man,
maika ayu wawa kopa nsaika,
you [who] keep talking to us,
tlus maika ilip nanish kopa
why don’t you first have a look at
ukuk pipa ikta nsaika mamuk,
this writing, what we’re doing,
pi iawa maika shako komtaks
and then you’ll learn
ikta tomtom pi ikta wawa
what spirit and what words
kopa ukuk Shinuk pipa.
are in this Chinook writing.
Was the KW readership really so widespread? And the use of the Duployan as well?
I love the taunting of “maika taii tkope man” and wish his English had been so direct. It’s the first use of tayi sarcastically deployed I’ve seen.
“Pi iawa……” is also novel to me. Any thought on that? It’s not “and there you will learn”? I would expect “alhqi”.
“Ikta tomtom pi ikta wawa……” (Slow standing ovation)
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I *really* like getting questions like these. Xiexie!
* Was the KW readership really so widespread? And the use of the Duployan as well?
= Kamloops Wawa had an Aboriginal readership throughout the Central and Interior Salish-speaking areas of BC — about Campbell River down the coast and then up the Fraser towards Kamloops, Lillooet, Okanagan country. It also had Native readers among the Carriers and Chilcotins. The use of Chinuk pipa (Duployan shorthand) predictably was most intense around Kamloops, among the Shuswap people who Father Le Jeune lived among, but I have found letters from as far away as Homalco and Quesnel, and have been told e.g. of a Chilcotin fella who kept a calendar/diary in the shorthand.
* I love the taunting of “maika taii tkope man” and wish his English had been so direct. It’s the first use of tayi sarcastically deployed I’ve seen.
= “Taii” here is the usual way of saying “government official”, with a synonym “gavmin” making its appearance later. But sarcasm is present here!
* “Pi iawa……” is also novel to me. Any thought on that? It’s not “and there you will learn”? I would expect “alhqi”.
= “Iawa”, which many readers will know as from the non-shorthand Chinook world, is most frequently used to mean “then” in the Kamloops region. To be clear that you mean “there”, you’d say “kopa iawa”. As for “alki”, that’s used much less than we English-speakers often seem to expect; in circumstances where we’d say “you will ___”, what’s normal in Chinuk Wawa is either (A) the plain verb, or (B) “alta” plus the verb. “Alta” is almost always translated as “now” in isolation, I mean when cited by itself in a dictionary, but its meaning is more clearly captured as “NON-PAST”, which covers its typical use in sequences of events: clause +”alta” +clause is the typical way of expressing that such-and-such happened “and then” such-and-such else happened.
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Ok, fascinating stuff. Thanks! Makes me want to go ahead and start reading the KW.
I’ve seen alta meaning “then” from GR usage. But even there, they stress this use of alta predominates in story telling. Indeed the old dictionaries which focussed on the wawa of Puget north must have a lot of distortions if alta was used in this way in the north, too. It was clear from the get go even the better lexicographers back in the day were trying to map the language from a Latin-based philological background. The CW ambiguities in time marking conventions are so much more interesting!
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