Morice: The Use and Abuse of Philology
Often we can spot Chinuk Wawa lurking behind the curtains, as other Northwest languages occupy center stage.
Father Adrien-Gabriel Morice pointed this out in his 1899 study, “The Use and Abuse of Philology“.
On page 99, Morice points out a small inaccuracy in George Mercer Dawson’s published vocabulary of 2 BC Athabaskan (Dene) languages:
My husband eskuh-le’-na(,) ske-le-na
The sine which in Dawson’s Vocabulary precedes
this word, and the three that follow imme-
diately, means ego, I, me, and recalls to mind
the Chinook naika, probably used by the
enquirer towards his interpreter. It is al-
together foreign to the words wherein it is
incorporated in Dawson’s Vocabulary.
You see that? Morice understood that the researcher had to have been using Chinook Jargon to get words of Dene from his experts.
And that use of Jargon had an effect on how the resulting Dene data was phrased.
We already know that Dawson did indeed use Chinuk Wawa when possible in his British Columbia work.
We’ve found similar telltale traces of Chinook in the work of other researchers, including Professor Franz Boas, on Indigenous languages of the region.
