Hidden discoveries: Extinct animals & creole-pidgin ethnozoology (Part 2)
< massache mawitch > (image credit: Wikipedia)
I’ve started a mini-series on previously obscure animals and species names in the 1850s “Reports of Explorations…” for a railroad line across the Northwest.After the grizzly bear comments previously noted, a similar geographic limitation on moose habitat west of the Cascade Mountains is brought up on page 133:
I have obtained from Dr. Webber, of Steilacoom, a skull of an animal of the deer kind which the Indians say was formerly very plentiful, but now exterminated, and which they call in the Chinook jargon the massache maivitch [i.e. mas(h)áchi mawitch], or bad deer.
This is super cool. We haven’t known a word in Jargon for ‘moose’ before.
(Despite the supposed, but disavowed, A.C. Anderson published lexicon giving us < moose > — while defining it as ‘elk’!)
Quite something, eh, for a pidgin-creole language to have a word for locally extinct animals.
Extinct but obviously of cultural importance.
It brings to mind my recent post here about ‘sea otter’ in Chinookan and Chinuk Wawa seeming to be a loanword from Quinault Salish to the north.
On the subject of completely nonnative animals, George Gibbs on page 138 shares the opinion — informed and therefore of note — but still an opinion:
“The [Chinook] jargon word for cattle is Moos-moos, and is a corruption of Moos-moos-chin, the Walla-Walla word for buffalo.”
This pronouncement directly follows a discussion of the American buffalo having been extinct for quite some time west of the Rockies.
Knowing that fact, we’d expect a high likelihood of Walla Walla Sahaptin having borrowed its word for bison, and honestly I lean toward thinking that this < Moos-moos-chin > came from the peculiar Chinookan version of the Chinuk Wawa word for ‘cow, cattle’ (from Eastern Algonquian, and related to English ‘moose’). Chinookan has a still not-fully-explained suffix, approximately -ki, on that word…
Stay tuned for more new Jargon species names in this mini-series.
Was he British by any chance? “Moose” is the original meaning of elk, preserved throughout the Germanic languages* except in North America, where it has somehow shifted to the wapiti (Cervus canadensis), a species much more similar to the Eurasian red deer (C. elaphus) than to the moose.
And in Scientific, where the moose is named by Caesar’s Germanic loanword in Latin – Alces alces.
But “moose” is an Algonquian word (literally ‘it strips (bark) ‘ ) for “moose”, not “elk”.
Adding a note to reflect that moose (despite now being kind of common here around Spokane) may in fact never have historically lived in Washington state, according to this study anyway. (Much as I’ve heard claims about moose invading to the south in interior BC within historical memory.) So any Jargon word for this animal may have come about in fur brigade’s usage farther north…
And adding this — in the Quileute language of Washington’s north seaward (not Puget Sound) coast, ‘moose’ is expressed by a 2-word phrase, literally ‘flat antlers’. Looks like a recent coinage, as I can’t find terms for ‘moose’ in other tribal languages of the Olympic Peninsula. I can’t help thinking ‘flat antlers’ sounds very much like the way Chinuk Wawa names quite a few species of fauna, but I repeat, the only CW word for moose is the above ‘evil(-tempered) deer’.