Daily Archive: October 21, 2015

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A Salish word for talking pidgin

So I take it: <hwshupmenqun> in Hul’q’umi’num’ of Vancouver Island, BC is said to mean “speak broken English”. In Americanist notation, that’d be xʷšəpménqən. It’s thought to be “probably from ‘shipman’ “. (With… Continue reading →

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A metaphor: “to eat” as “to hold a grudge”?

I’ve noticed this expression a few times through the years in my travels through the expansive Chinuk pipa shorthand world: makmak, with a human as its direct object. Nowhere have I found this term overtly… Continue reading →