Learning from the Lane learners (Part 1)
I want to show appreciation to the great people of Lane Community College in Oregon, who have created a magazine in, and titled, chinuk-wawa.
My thought is to highlight various points of their magazine that I find really delightful & inspiring.
In chinuk-wawa tənəs-buk makwst ( = issue 2 (for the year 2022) ), the first words are
Henry Zenk pi Beth Sheppard ɬaska munk-kəmtəks chinuk-skul.
That is, “Henry Zenk and Beth Sheppard teach the Chinook Jargon classes.” I want you to sign up for their Lane CC courses! These began in 2006, and they’re the best thing yet to make a Chinuk Wawa speaker out of you.
Plus, students of the course get to order a copy of the very latest CW dictionary, containing all the newest words for stuff you need to talk about. (‘Airplane’, ‘security guard’, ‘video game’…) These are a much-requested item.
Another excellent item is this chinuk-wawa magazine, which you can download or print out, for free.
The next words in issue #2 are these on page 2, using an expression that I really like:
Leslie Wells pi Chanda Diekotto chakchak-siyaxus ɬaska.
Which is to say, ‘Leslie Wells & Chanda Diekotto are the eagle-eyes’ — the editors!
The pages of this magazine are numbered pipa 2, pipa 3, pipa 4, etc. So do you understand where it says, on the same page:
Dustin Ryan yaka munk pʰikcha kʰapa pipa chxi-chaku.
For me, that’s saying ‘Dustin Ryan made the picture on the next page.’ Literally: ‘on the page that’s about to come along.’ Nice, eh?
Also on page 2, Henry Zenk’s tənəs iləp-wawa (‘Brief Introduction’) starts this way:
alta yakwa ukuk, uk nsa leyn tayi-skul chinuk-wawa pipa-buk, uk nim Chinuk Wawa…
I translate this as ‘Now here it is, this Lane College Chinuk Wawa magazine of ours, called Chinuk Wawa…‘
I picked that out to spotlight because I like pipa-buk ‘paper-book’ for ‘magazine’. And it’s good to know the common & useful Grand Ronde expression …uk nim… ‘(which is) called/named…’
Henry goes on to observe:
kʰa-wik hilu uk covid-sik, bət kakupus tunus-tunus nsayka chaku-k’wan ukuk. pi wəx̣t kakwa nsayka chaku-k’wan uk zoom-q’wetɬ.
‘The Covid disease still hasn’t disappeared, but it seems little by little we’ve gotten used to it. And we’ve also gotten used to these Zoom connections.’ To me it’s very satisfying to have a way of expressing ‘getting used to’ stuff in Jargon.
One more phrase of Henry’s that I want to share with you is the counterpart to pipa chxi-chaku ‘next page’:
uk skul-kʰul chxi-hilu
‘last school year’, i.e. ‘the school-year that’s just now all used up’.
There’s plenty more neat stuff that I want to feature from chinuk-wawa buk 2. Stay tuned!
