1871: ADDENDA to early-creolized Chinuk Wawa
Some overlooked early-creolized Chinuk Wawa lexicon…
It’s from the lower Columbia River area, naturally.
Here’s an image of page 66 from Demers, Blanchet, & St. Onge (1871), listing certain expressions they’d forgotten to include in their dictionary’s earlier pages.

page 66
I won’t go into all of these phrases, but some of them have been left out of other dictionaries:
- < Ia! > ‘ah! (exclamation of supplication)’
Presumably yá, and reminiscent of interjections found in “northern” Chinuk Wawa songs. - < Lepashe > ‘sheppard’ [i.e. shepherd]
From French le berger, in what I take as a Canadian pronunciation with “A”. Evidently not a commonly used word, this more probably would be found in the priests’ explanations of Christian ideas. - < Tlush Kwanom San > ‘Good Friday’ [the Christian celebration]
I.e. łúsh qwínəm-sán, using an old Jargon expression ‘fifth sun’ for ‘Friday’.