Were you horse-stealing?
The humor in this Chinuk Wawa quote is left untranslated, as usual in frontier times when the readers who mattered would understand it anyway!
Today’s terse quotation is good linguistic data. Two tipoffs are the unusual spellings and the accurate replication of the “null” preposition (instead of copa) at the end.
The third and strongest is the writer’s correct understanding of an ambiguity in the Jargon’s grammar, leading to jocularity:
In conversing with the Indian yesterday who was arrested, and being asked if he capswallowed cuitan he answered with the greatest simplicity and honesty, Nawitka, nica capswallow mox cuitan copa ich man, Warm Springs.
— from the Dalles (OR) Times-Mountaineer of September 26, 1891, page 3, column 1
capswallow cuitan = kapshwála kíyutən = ‘steal (a) horse’
and
Nawitka, nica capswallow mox cuitan copa ich man, Warm Springs = nawítka, náyka kapshwála mákwst kíyutən kʰapa íxt mán Ø Warm Springs = indeed, I steal two horse from one man at Warm Springs = ‘Yes, I stole two horses from a guy at Warm Springs [Indian Reservation].”
Genuine Chinuk Wawa.
Adding capswallow to my daily speech. 🙂
Next step: put it into UrbanDictionary.com!
I found it interesting that this newsman Davenport claimed Chief Joseph was 85 in 1903, when in actuality he had been born in 1840 and would have been just 63 at the time of the interview. I have long suspected that it was the careless and perhaps senstionalistic intent of reporters to exaggerate the age of te local Indians here on the plateau. Eventually they even reported that Mary Moses was 132 when she died.
I enjoy all of your posts – thank you for the historical insights as well as the linguistic exercise!
Thanks Sharon, and I agree that there was quite a sensational tradition of reporting old Native people’s ages as stretching back into antiquity…
I wonder if the website’s transcriber misread a handwritten “65” as “85”; they put a disclaimer in to say some of the document had been hard to make out.