Chinook Jargon in the news: and due respect for PNW history
All the way over in New Jersey, we find Chinuk Wawa showing up in a current news item.
(Click that link to go read it.)
Colchuck Peak (image credit: NJToday)
It’s about how someone found the body of a mountain climber who had disappeared in an avalanche last winter in Chelan County, Washington.
Relevant quote for us:
The Colchuck Glacier, which lies on the northeast slopes of the peak, melts into Colchuck Lake. The mountain and glacier take their name from the lake, which in Chinook jargon means “cold water”.
My comment: cole chuck shows up in a number of oldtime dictionaries of CJ with the meaning of ‘ice’, so the glacier, not the lake, might be the source of the name.
This is true especially for CJ as used by English-speaking Settlers, who confused kʰúl tsə́qw ‘cold water’ and q’ə́l(-q’əl) tsə́qw ‘ice’ (literally ‘hard(-hard) water’) with each other.
I notice local boy from Entiat (and well-known linguist of Pacific NW languages) M. Dale Kinkade told his colleague William Bright the ‘cold water’ story about the lake. It seems perfectly possible to me that when Dale was growing up in the 1930s and 40s, everyone locally “knew” this etymology.
But the name “Colchuck Lake”, like most others for wilderness places in the PNW, seems to have been a late invention. A quick bit of research suggests to me that it only started being used circa 1930.
So it’s probable that this is another of the dozens of US Forest Service-bestowed Jargon place names around us from that era. And those names came from a “briefed” (much shortened) dictionary, apparently being chosen by non-speakers of the language, who often made interesting mistakes.
In short, yes, Colchuck (kʰúl tsə́qw) can literally mean ‘cold water’ — and for smalltown folks in north-central WA nearly a century ago, they’d be highly aware of that. Many people still knew, and occasionally used, some Jargon words in our communities at that time.
But in actual use, this same phrase of Chinuk Wawa typically meant ‘ice’ (especially when q’ə́l(-q’əl) tsə́qw was meant), or even ‘snow’.
(Snow on the ground, at least. In a lovely parallel with the local Interior Salish languages, CW has a separate term for ‘snow’ as it’s falling, cole snass (kʰúl snás).)
Thus I want to suggest we revise the etymology of Colchuck to give due respect to its glacier, a land feature that, to judge from the photo above, may soon disappear. We don’t want to forget history, do we?
