Culture lessons: Things Chinuk Wawa doesn’t do (Part 9: Rhymes)
Rhyme, schmyme!
(Here’s a link to the other installments in this series.)
Image credit: Fort Calgary
Chinook Jargon doesn’t rhyme with anything.
That is, there’s no cultural tradition in this language that’s driven its speakers to pay attention to words’ final syllables sounding similar to each other.
Of course there are some words that do rhyme, by the standards of languages that have such traditions, e.g. the French and English that played a part in the early formation of the Jargon:
- mán & sán (‘man’ & ‘day’)
- spún & mún (‘spoon’ & ‘month’)
- lipʰwá & límá (‘peas’ & ‘hand’)
Huh, is it mainly the European-sourced words that are easily rhymeable in Chinook?
Anyway, this is not the first time that I’ve pointed out, Chinuk Wawa has a small vocabulary — that is, if you’re only counting root forms. As in many Pacific NW tribal languages, there are only a few hundred roots in CW.
Also as in PNW tribal languages, there are in fact vastly more words than that in Wawa. When actually speaking the language, we use the more complex, inflected forms of roots. But that involves adding prefixes, mostly; so this still doesn’t alter the endings of those words, to give us any added chances to rhyme things.
So that’s a huge point again Jargon rhyming.
One point in favor of Jargon rhyming: this language is mighty forgiving of pronunciation! That’s a by-product of the “small vocabulary” feature. This might have some possibilities for developing a CW poetic tradition, in a European-inspired style. I’m saying you could get away with some imprecise, “slant” rhyming.
But here’s a point we can consider: In PNW languages such as the ones that helped originally create Chinuk Wawa, the closest things to “rhyming” that I’ve noticed tend to be what Europeans might call
- puns (words that sound similar in totality, not just in their endings)
- and alliteration (words containing similar sounds, perhaps regardless of position inside a word).
Might we develop a more Indigenous-oriented tradition of “rhyming”?
Then again, how badly do we need European-style “poetry” or European-style “songs lyrics” in Chinook Jargon?
Countless Settler colonizers have attempted both. Almost always with quite limited success. That’s why there’s a huge file (about 70 entries so far) of what I call “doggerel” poetry associated with the Jargon. Poetry + CJ = a big enough subject for a grad student to do a thesis on.
The devil’s advocate in me can’t resist suggesting that it wouldn’t take mad computer skills to sort of automate rhyme-finding in Chinuk Wawa.
I invite you to ponder…
