“Skookum” in the news
A good Jargon-related article just came out in a Toronto paper…
…and they interviewed at least one expert 🙂
— go read it at the Toronto (ON) Star of May 9, 2020
A good Jargon-related article just came out in a Toronto paper…
…and they interviewed at least one expert 🙂
— go read it at the Toronto (ON) Star of May 9, 2020
I lived on Whidbey Island as a kid, where the education system was a bit old fashioned compared to elsewhere in the state. And there we were actually taught a little bit about Chinook Jargon in elementary school (along with doing plays based on local native legends for example, and lots of other native-inspired art activities), at least in that it was a language fur traders and native americans used to speak to each other with, and that virtually all fur traders and shopkeepers knew it. However I seem to recall it was simply called “Chinook” and nothing about what kind of language (an easy one!) it was was taught, and we didn’t get any examples either. So I lived a long time with the mistaken impression that all the fur traders had learned the actual, very complicated Chinook language — and also that Chinook (Jargon) was a completely dead language. To my surprise almost 20 years later I found out that’s not the case, and then I went and learned it thanks to this blog!
I’m really grateful that so many place names have remained with it. I probably wouldn’t ever have learned it or looked into it further if so many Jargon words weren’t left in place names that I hadn’t recognized some common words when I skimmed a Jargon list when I was first researching it. When I was a kid, I lived right across from a place called Cultus Bay. When I told my dad what that name means a few weeks ago, he just laughed and said “it certainly was useless!”.
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