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.

addenda

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’.

What do you think?

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