Highbush cranberry, a Thompson “Chinuk Wawa” word
Annie Zíxtkʷu York said, in “Thompson Ethnobotany” and the “Thompson River Salish Dictionary”:
kʷúkʷns ‘highbush cranberry’ is a Chinook Jargon loan into this southern interior BC language.
This is new to me. Any ideas of its etymology?
There are a number of other words labeled as Chinuk Wawa loans in the TRS dictionary, as I recall, that are as puzzling as this.
Hmm.
Not a botanist, but that image looks to me like kinnikinnick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinnikinnick), which was definitely part of voyageur French (by whatever name). But I’m not the right person to try to plot the course of that transmission, if transmission there was.
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I am not sure of this plant but I don’t think the leaves look like kinnikinnick.
Why would a local food plant be called by a name in Chinook Wawa? Even if the berries were an article of trade, surely that trade would have been much older than CW.
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According to Wikipedia, “kinnikinnick” is on Algonkian origin and means two things: a smoking mixture, and (as used in BC at least) an edible berry-like fruit growing on a very low plant. Look up “bearberry” for a picture of that plant (I have seen the word “bearberry” but never heard it in BC and did not know what it was). The leaves are very different from those on the picture, which look more than tree leaves than those of an berry-bearing plant.
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(Sorry for the typos – can you clean them up?)
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No worries about typos, M-L, Iʹm actually not noticing any at the moment.
Your questions are good ones. Iʹm happy to see a possible Jargon word for a specific type of cranberry, since weʹve previously only known ~ /sulmixʷ/. More to learn here…
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