1778: Captain James Cook on the PNW coast — Definitely not Nootka Jargon, but… (Part 2: Vocabulary)

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In Part 1 of this mini-series on James Cook’s first-contact narrative, I showed what he expressed in the narrative of his 1778 visit in Nuuchahnulth country at what’s now known as Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, BC, Canada.

Screenshot 2024-02-06 122145

A Nuuchahnulth chapitz koole (image credit: First Arts)

I showed that the spellings and the comments made by Cook and his crew clearly indicate great difficulty with the local language, and a lack of any pre-existing Northwest Coast pidgin / trade language.

That said, I want to now delve for a moment into the fairly ample lexical documentation appended to Cook’s report.

It contains many dozens of Nuuchahnulth expressions.

Virtually all of these appear to my eyes — those of a linguist with some direct experience of that language, but less knowledge than several specialists who I know — to be single words.

What I’m primarily interested in, as the most obvious potential signs of incipient pidginization by the locals and Cook’s guys, are multi-word phrases.

And there are less than a handful of these, as far as I can see.

(I expect my Southern Wakashan speaker & scholar friends might turn up just as many more.)

So here are the phrases I can see in Cook’s vocabulary list — perhaps the very first building blocks of pidginized “Nootka Jargon”, and therefore the earliest demonstrable ancestors of Chinuk Wawa a.k.a. “Chinook Jargon”.

I’m also making note (“NB”) of 1 single word that has relevance to our conversation.

Part 2: Volume 7, pages 453-457:
“Vocabulary of the Language of Nootka, or King George’s Sound, April, 1778″.

  • Page 453:
    • eenaeehl nas ‘sky’
      (synonym: nas; literally, ‘___ + sky’;
      perhaps Adjective + Noun word order, as in English & Chinook Jargon?)
    • takho, seekemaile ‘this iron is bad’
      (literally, ‘bad + iron’;
      apparently Predicative Adjective + Intransitive Subject Noun word order, as in Chinook Jargon)
  • Page 454:
    • chapitz koole ‘the model of a canoe’
      (literally, ‘___ + canoe’)
    • (NB tchoo ‘throw it down, or to me’;
      this is the word I hear people say for ‘alright; okay; goodbye‘ now, čuu;
      surely it won’t be the only word Cook’s people misunderstood.)

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?

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