1916: Chinook interpreter needed
Headlined “Didn’t Understand Oath”, today’s old news clipping adds to our abundant proof that Chinuk Wawa got used a whole lot in Pacific Northwest courts.
Monthly Archive: May, 2021
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Drawing a different, silent moral from “A Stingy Girl is Taken Away by Mountain People”
I’ve recently come back to studying a certain tale by the Grand Ronde elder, Victoria Howard…
Another reason why chaku- verbs aren’t passive
In my research on Chinuk Wawa, I admit it took years to come to see verbs prefixed with chaku- (literally ‘come’) as Inceptive Aspect.
“Cultus kopa nika” is a northern CW expression
A pretty famous expression in Chinook Jargon is ‘I don’t care’, commonly spelled < cultus kopa nika > in the old, English-speaker-oriented publications.
Competing etymologies for láwtish
A word recorded in Grand Ronde’s creolized southern-dialect Chinuk Wawa, and nowhere else, is láwtish ‘a bickerer, argumentative person’.
At last, an explanation for the idiom mə́kʰmək ‘resent, envy’?
This will be just a quick morsel.
Heard in the wild: “chucks”
UBC forestry professor Suzanne Simard, author of the book “Finding the Mother Tree”, dropped some Chinuk Wawa into her interview with Dave Davies on NPR’s “Fresh Air” program this week.
1888: A sermon by Myron Eells (part 4)
We’re up to page 35 of Horatio Hale’s book “An International Idiom” today…
Another Indigenous metaphor: ‘Afternoon’ in CW is from Chinookan
Chinuk Wawa’s southern dialect, as documented in the Grand Ronde Indian Reservation community, says láx̣w-sán (literally ~ ‘leaning-sun’) for ‘afternoon’.
Hunting in the south, hunting in the north
One of the many ways that the southern and northern dialects of Chinuk Wawa differ is in how they talk about hunting.