Life among the Inuit, in Chinuk Wawa
I promised this when I showed you “Life among the Crees, in Chinuk Wawa“, and I deliver.
Visiting Kamloops Indian Reserve, Monsignor Grouard OMI of Athabasca is lecturing about his business trips.
Now he tells about the people of the far North, deliberately exoticizing them to encourage the Secwepemc to feel superior:
Ilip saia kopa kanawi tilikom mitlait Iskimo
Beyond all (other) people live the Eskimotilikom: aias klahawiam kopa kanawi tilikom.
people; they’re the most miserable of all people.Ilo kansih klaska mamuk kuk klaska makmak. Ikta
They never cook their food. Whateverklaska makmak, klaska makmak [NULL] ilo kuk. Klaska tlap
they eat, they eat [it] raw. They catchfish pi klaska makmak [NULL], ilo klaska mamuk kuk iaka
fish and they eat [it], they don’t cook it.Pus chako kol ilihi pi ayu sno mitlait klaska
When winter comes and there’s a lot of snow, theymamuk haws kopa kol ilihi. Ukuk haws kanawi
make winter houses. These houses are completelyais Klaska iskom sno, klaska mamuk kyut
ice. They take some snow, they cutukuk sno kakwa aias ston, skwir ston; pi
this snow up like a big stone, a squared stone; andklaska mash chok sahali kopa ukuk ston,
they pour water over this “stone”,aiak iaka chako ais, klaska mash ukuk sno ston
it quickly turns to ice, they put this snow stonesahali kopa ilip* klaska mamuk, pi klaska mamuk kakwa
on top of the first ones they made, and they build likeston haws, kanawi ais, ilo shimni, ilo windo
a stone house, all ice, without a chimney, without windows ,kopit tanas laport: pus man tiki klatwa kopa haws
only a little doorway: if a person wants to go into the house,iaka ashnu, pi iaka kuli kakwa kamuks kopa ilihi.
he kneels down, and he moves like a dog along the ground.Pus klaska mitlait kopa ukuk aias haws, wik
When they’re inside these houses,
klaska mamuk paia, ilo shimni mitlait, kakwa ilo
they don’t build fires; there’s no chimney, sooihat kopa smok, kopit tanas lamp klaska
there’s no way for the smoke to go, they onlymamuk; Sawash lamp, wik kakwa ukuk ilihi lamp
make small lamps, Native lamps, not like the lamps of this country.Klaska iskom ilihi iaka tipso iaka nim mos;
They get a ground plant called moss;klaska iskom drai mos, pi klaska mamuk patl
they take some dried moss, and they fillukuk mos kopa fish gris, ukuk aias fish
this moss with the grease of of a fish, theiaka nim hwil iaka gris. Klaska mamuk paia ukuk
grease of that big fish called a whale. They light thismos, pi iaka chako lait pi iaka chako tanas
moss, and it lights and it gets somewhatwam. Klaska mamuk mitlait ukuk mos kopa iht ston
warm. They put this moss on a stone.Kakwa dish ukuk ston; pi sahali kopa ukuk
This stone is like a dish; and above thispaia klaska mamuk mitlait kansih pawn ukuk hwil gris
fire they place several pounds of this whale fat.Ukuk gris pus chako tanas wam, iaka fol dawn
The fat, when warming up a bit, it fallsiht drop pi iht drop kopa ukuk paia mos,
one drop by one drop onto this burning moss,pi kakwa iaka lili mitlait lait pi paia Ukuk tilikom
and this way it stays lit and burning for a long time. These peoplemitlait kopa kakwa haws tlun mun, lakit mun, kata
live in houses like these for three months, four months, howeverlili son iaka ilo gitop Kakwa lili wiht wik
long the sun doesn’t rise. For as long as that,klaska chako klahani kopa ukuk ais haws
they also don’t come out of these ice houses.Wik klaska kol kopa ukuk ais haws, kopa iaka
They aren’t cold in this ice house; [but] inside of itchako ayu hom kopa tilikom klaska itluil pi kopa
it gets very smelly from people’s bodies and fromukuk fish iaka gris klaska mamuk paia.
that fish [whale] oil they burn.
(Kamloops Wawa #137, February 1896, page 36)
It’s not crystal-clear from this whether Grouard ever visited the Inuit, or is telling secondhand stories.
Cheers!
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Linguistic note: there is a lot of negativity in this text, so I noticed the word “ilo” which seems to be the negation. Do you know what is its origin?
“Ilo” = “halo” in the more well-known of old English-language sources = “hilu” in the Grand Ronde dictionary. The etymology of this mysterious word is suggested there to be a Haida item hiiluu ‘be finished, all gone, no more’ via Nootka Jargon, per Ross Clark. Use of “hilu”/”ilo” varied by region; it was the usual negator at Kamloops except in certain negative-polarity items, while my impression of Grand Ronde and the mid-to-lower Columbia River region is that “wik” was the default negator. Some interesting stuff going on with this little word!
Extraordinary stuff, Dave. Dazzles the mind. The only comparison I can think of for the troves you have in hand are the Slave Letters in Negerhollands elicited by the Moravian Brethren on the Virgin Islands in the 1700s. See p 180 ff in Entwisted Tongues for references.
Hayu masi George! (Shorsh, in Kamlups Wawa spelling.) There is tons more coming, watch this space over the next few years. And I will try to get it all published with translations, a dictionary, etc. to make it all usable for those who speak & study Chinuk Wawa.
George/Shorsh: the spelling with “sh” suggests that the name was borrowed in its French not English form. In French “Georges” (s is silent) the initial and final consonant is a fricative not an affricate. (It was an affricate in Old French, a dialect of which was brought to England by the Normans). The retention of “r” also suggests a French borrowing. I think that a borrowing from English would have replaced preconsonantal “or” by a long vowel.
Marie-Lucie, merci for your notes on “Shorsh” in Kamlups Chinuk Wawa. I agree that this is more a French loan than an English one. In the Chinuk pipa shorthand, an English hard “j” sound (dj) would usually be spelled with the letter for “ch”, thus we would expect *Chorch if this was felt to be an English name. We don’t find that — only Shorsh. Note that sometimes the dot that made a “ch” out of a “sh” letter was left out, which could keep alive the possibility that “Chorch” was intended, except I would want to have at least some occurrences of *Chorch in order to go with that source language.
The X-factor that keeps us on our toes in studying names written in Kamlups shorthand is, a kind of random distribution is found of English vs. French name loans, e.g. Andryu (English “Andrew”) but Piir (French “Pierre”) o_0 Not to mention the fun of deciphering Salish names as rendered in the overly simplistic shorthand!
Dave
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I wonder about the mix of French and English names. I wonder if the French ones were baptismal names given to locals but the English ones were names of people from elsewhere who arrived with these names already given? “Andryu” for Andrew looks funny – perhaps Le Jeune or another French speaker assumed that “ew” was pronounced the same everywhere, as in “Matthew” and “few” or (then) “new”. In French there is “Mathieu”, still used as given name (as well as a family name), and “Andrieu” which to my knowledge is only found as a family name (the equivalent of Andrew is “André” – originally from Greek Andreas – so perhaps Andrew does correspond to Andrieu).
Le Jeune always wrote what was “Andryu” in shorthand as “Andrew” in Roman letters, whereas he always distinguished between those guys known as Pierre and the ones called Pete (or Pit, as he sometimes had it).
Interesting stuff was going on with French around Kamloops:
– The priests, almost all of them from Belgium and Brittany, had their kind of French.
– There were generations-old families of Métis who apparently spoke a unique and very different French; I recall reading Le Jeune’s comment about their speech — ” ‘Les plus pires,’ comme nos métis ne craindraient pas de dire.” Their language influenced local Aboriginal languages.
– And separately there was all the mutated French in the widely-known Chinuk Wawa (and thence Aboriginal languages).
Hi, months later, I just saw this thread.
About Métis French:
Wherever Le Jeune came from, he spoke an educated form of French and was not familiar with the French of Canada or Normandy. In Standard French the word “pire” means ‘worse’, with a definite article “le pire” means ‘the worst’, so you don’t need to add the word “plus” ‘more, most’ to it. But in Canada and rural Normandy (where many Québécois originate from), “pire” means ‘very bad’, so “le(s) plus pire(s)” means something like ‘the most worst’ (singular/plural)’ . In France this form would be frowned upon and stigmatized, but Le Jeune says the Métis “would not be afraid of saying” it as no one among them would be criticizing their speech.
Many features labelled as typically Canadian (some of them found in CW) are actually old features of dialectal, rural speech in NorthWestern France.