Ikta Dale McCreery yaka t’ɬap (Part 6: Deciphering a newly found song)
Tune unknown, which may be a clue for us.
Image credit: FreePik
This song, I’m guessing, was told from an old memory, in a Nuxalk Salish-language frame.
“Framed” in Nuxalk, I say, because it starts with 3 lines that appear to be in that language, and it’s threaded through with Indigenous “vocables”, which we typically find to be from a singer’s tribal language. (Often that’s Haida, but not always.)
“From an old memory”, I say, because the phonetics are distorted.
But the rest of the lyrics here are Chinuk Wawa, for certain.
Our BC linguist friend Dale McCreery shared on the big Facebook “Chinook Jargon” group when he found a song we hadn’t known of before.
I agree with Dale’s description of it, which you’re about to read:
September 6, 2018: Here’s words to a Chinook song… I think the first verse is Nuxalk, but the rest is Chinook. Have fun figuring it out!
Haya ahiy haaya
Smus amtimkw kwala
wislam hayaii hayii
alhtsi sa kusik tam tam
haya a hii
kupa qa nayka mnlha
ahayii ha ya
wiiskii mamuukw kwa nayka aw
aay ii hii
Here was my 2018 suggested reading of those lyrics, in Chinuk Wawa, starting with the 4th line:
alhtsi sa kusik tam tam
(áłqi cháku-sik tə́mtəm
“(my) heart’s going to get sad”)
haya a hii
kupa qa nayka mnlha
(kʰupa qʰá náyka míłayt
“over where I live”)
ahayii ha ya
wiiskii mamuukw kwa nayka aw
(wíski mamuk-k’áw náyka áw
“booze has got my brother all tied up/in jail”)
aay ii hii
Here’s part of what I was thinking in 2018, in deciphering the song this way:
- Native languages often have words for “policeman” that mean “he ties people up”. (For instance, the Sk‘wxwú7mesh Sníchim [Squamish Salish] word nexwsxwík‘wem ‘police’ is built from xwík‘w ‘be arrested, be tied up’.)
- And the genre of Victoria (BC) songs in Chinook Jargon often plays out as laments about city life.
A (more) believable alternative reading now occurs to me.
The “alhtsi sa kusik tam tam” line may be Nuxalk- (or better yet Tsimshian-) accented Chinuk Wawa ~ á, chxí chaku-sík tə́mtəm. We know that a Tsimshian, among other BC Coast speakers, would say approximately skí for CW’s chxí ‘just now; new’. And the resulting meaning, “Ah, (my) heart’s just now gotten sad”, is more in line with how Victoria songs phrase themselves — stating an actual situation that’s already occurred, not wringing one’s hands over a potential future event.
Also, the line “wiiskii mamuukw kwa nayka aw” might very well be wíski mamuk-k’wás(h) nayka áw ‘booze is terrorizing my brother’. I admit to finding this reading a little problematic, semantically, because it has the inanimate booze as an active force in control of my brother. Then again, this line of the song already has wiiskii as an active subject, no matter how we interpret the verb. And an old, widely known northern-dialect Jargon hymn warns us, wiski miməlus tilixam ‘booze [actively] kills people’.
