A new discovery: Why you should “count” on language change in Chinuk Wawa
A new discovery about southern vs. northern Chinuk Wawa dialect differences!
Counting Chinook…I know, a cheesy choice of image here 😁 (image credit: The Columbian)
If you’ve already learned some Grand Ronde-style (i.e. southern dialect) Chinook Jargon, you’ll constantly notice newer words from English in the northern dialect (i.e. of BC, Washington, Alaska, etc.).
But you’d be off track if you thought either of the following:
- Seems like up north, we replace solid Jargon words with English whenever we feel like it???
- Oh, in the northern dialect, they forgot so much existing Jargon that they won’t understand me when I talk differently from those newer English-based expressions???
Actually — it’s a demonstrable fact that northerners still understood, and used, lots of long-existing phrases from the older southern dialect.
Northern speakers often used both the older and the newer synonyms!
This is especially true when the older expression was more than 1 word, with the component words still being used up north.
In other words, single-word southernisms often got replaced entirely & forgotten up north.
But phrases of 2+ words that already existed down south stayed in use in the north, even while the north continued Chinuk Wawa’s perpetual habit of adding new words.
This meant that northern CW preserved old (southern) bits & pieces in set phrases, even though one or both of those bits & pieces was otherwise unused in the north — a great example being a handful of phrases using the negator, wik, which we find hardly used outside of those phrases.
(Wik-kata ‘can’t’, wik-tlus ‘bad’, and wik-saia ‘almost’ are a nearly complete list of these fossil phrases.)
Sometimes, as with those useful expressions I just told you, there didn’t exist any synonym / alternative way to express those concepts.
But sometimes, an innovated synonym using English material was current in northern CW, right along with the older phrase remaining in use.
Today we have a wonderful exhibit of this second situation that I’m talking about; it’s the expressions for ‘counting’.
Since the Jargon originated as a “trade language”, of course it had to have ways to talk about this concept, eh?
From the Kamloops Wawa newspaper, we find lots of instances showing how “kawnt” & “mamuk kansih” cooccur.
- Shaina man mamuk kansih kakwa…
‘Chinese people count like this…’
(KW #031a, 19 June 1892) - …drit ayu mawntin, wik kata iaka mamuk kansih kanawi
‘…there were really lots of mountains, and he couldn’t count them all’
(KW #210, June 1904) - Nanich kanawi ukuk tsiltsil sahali: drit ayu klaska, wik kata maika mamuk kawnt…
‘Look at all those starts above: there are so many of them, you can’t count them…’
(KW #118a, July 1894) - Mamuk mitlait iaka kopa chok, pi kawnt “Wan, tu, tri”
‘Put her/him [a baby] in the water, and count “One, two, three”.’
(KW #143, August 1896)
It’s wonderful to notice that the earliest use of kawnt that I could find is a transitional form, mamuk kawnt (‘make count’). That is, it seems modeled on mamuk kansih! Soon this transitioned further, to a one-word expression kawnt, likely under continued influence from locally spoken English.
So there you have it — like all other languages on Earth, Chinook Jargon was, and is, always changing!
