Is there Chinook Jargon in the Stefánsson Collection?
Do we have to wait for the Covid-19 pandemic to abate, to find out if there’s Chinuk Wawa in the Stefánsson Collection?
The person in question (image credit: Wikipedia)
I’m not finding a way to preview the collection online, but some Google searches on Chinook Jargon have led me to the following resource:
It could be very interesting to find out what knowledge the explorer / researcher Vilhjalmur Stefansson had of Chinuk Wawa!
He’s one of our main sources of knowledge about “PIdgin Eskimo”, so maybe he had a good linguistic awareness…
I read one of his books and he was definitely good at languages. Grew up speaking Icelandic at home so he noticed himself that he was way better at understanding native (at least Inuit, and in regards to something like case systems) languages than his American/Canadian peers, because he at least knew the difference between nominative, accusative and dative…
Later when I get some free time I can search to see if there’s any mentions of him or anything involving him that might be a reference to Chinook Jargon over at timarit.is which is the Icelandic newspaper archive site.
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