Going to blazes with Chief Andrew
Follow the blazes and the notes tacked to the trees, to get through the woods with Chief Andrew of Chu Chua! Here is how: Chi alta nsaika kilapai kopa Kamlups. Saia nsaika I’ve… Continue reading
Monthly Archive: March, 2016
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Download “The Chinook Jargon and How to Use It”
George C. Shaw’s useful 1909 book “The Chinook Jargon and How to Use It” has been uploaded in a very clean and readable copy by Oregon State University. Go, read, print out, learn.
Stlaashin is a small mystery
Does stlaashin mean “food” or “a giveaway”–“potlatch” even? I came upon this new word in Bishop Durieu’s Bible History; it’s in the story of Daniel and Balthazar (Belshazzar), which incidentally is the source of… Continue reading
Two things I learned today
Thing #1: the characters I knew as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, from the Bible story of a crime against humanity (3 young men thrown into a raging furnace), are also known as Ananias,… Continue reading
Musical instrument, another Secwepemctsin loan into Jargon
Here is a fun loan from Secwepemctsin (Shuswap Salish) into Kamloops Chinuk Wawa: huhulitin ‘musical instrument’. The earliest example I find is this one: Divid David aias komtaks pli myusik kopa iht huhulitin iaka nim… Continue reading
Who’d’a Thunk It Dept.: Sennacherib from 2 different authors in Chinuk Wawa
“The Destruction of Sennacherib“, some of you know, originally composed in English verse by Lord Byron in 1815, was translated into Chinook Jargon in 1903 by JJ Edwards, and now resides in a file at… Continue reading
Animate and inanimate possessors
So here is an essentially randomly picked li’l stretch of Chinook Jargon: Kimta klaska kakshit Sidisias iaka Then they beat on Zedechiah’s siahus pi klaska mamuk klatwa iaka kopa Babilon skukum haws. face… Continue reading
Kamloops residential school: Chinook paper as a primary source
I often claim that the Chinook Jargon documents that I work with daily are as valuable historically as linguistically. Indian residential schools holding the kind of importance that they do in the Canadian… Continue reading
Don’t write Bisi, write B.C.
One of Father Le Jeune’s tidy little charts that can be so fun: “ABBREVIATIONS” Pus msaika tiki mamuk If you folks want to tanas iht iht nim, tlus msaika tlus nanich ukuk: shorten… Continue reading
iilhit: pidgin Secwepemctsin in Chinook Jargon?
A few years ago, I mentioned on the old CHINOOK group a Salish-looking word I found in Kamloops Wawa: iilhit. Back then, I didn’t grasp the meaning of iilhit, but because it’s used in… Continue reading