Clah’s Chinook revisited
With the help of some friends, I’d like to hark back to a reported Chinuk Wawa conversation.
With the help of some friends, I’d like to hark back to a reported Chinuk Wawa conversation.
Subtitled, thoughtfully, “And the Causes That Led to It”.
…because it’s happily snarled up.
I’m curious what my readers will think about the Chinook Jargon quoted here…
It can’t be a coincidence that post-frontier Pacific Northwest settler society, preoccupied with building up the mythic greatness of its earliest arrivals, borrowed Chinuk Wawa’s word for “old times” into English…
The unavoidable Chinuk Wawa word “chako” (cháku) is typically explained as having come to us originally from Nuuchahnulth (“NCN”, of Vancouver Island, Canada)…but it may have as many as three sources.
One of the topics that keeps intersecting with my unifying theme of Chinook Jargon is the use of multiple pidgin languages here in the West.
This is a book that makes more of a literary impression than a linguistic one, but there’s worthy Chinooking from the British Columbia frontier here.
Way, way back when, in fur-trade times, “the River Quinze Sous” was a name for southwest Washington state’s Newaukum River, or according to some sources, the Chehalis River to which it’s a tributary.
As a Depression-Era honeymoon trip, a young couple rode horses across BC, retracing Alexander Mackenzie’s trailblazing 1793 steps at a time when Chinuk Wawa was still spoken in many locales.