1897, Chilliwack BC: I delate cumtuxed or heap sabed
I’m sorry that all I have is this tantalizing British Columbia snippet from an obscure book for you today.
Image credit: Allan Brooks Nature Centre
Here’s another piece for our file on the co-occurrence of 2 West Coast pidgin languages, Chinuk Wawa and Chinese Pidgin English.
…sized fish and they told me they were ‘Konaway Quo-
qwa’ i.e. ‘all same size’, but 1 saw a broad looking tail
showing below the others and pulled out the above
beauty and paid my “Four Bits’. The wily Siwash told
me I ‘delate cumtuxed’ or ‘heap sabed’ as a Chinaman
would have said. It will weigh about thirty pounds;
it is 36 inches long. The above sketch is drawn to scale,
a Spring or King Salmon, Onchorhynchos chonica [tsch-
awvischal. I wish I could give him to you.
— from page 54 of “Allan Brooks, Artist-Naturalist” by Hamilton Mack Laing (Victoria, BC: BC Provincial Museum, 1979)
- konaway quoqua = kʰánawi kákwa = ‘all the same’.
- bit = ‘a dime’, but 4 bits is 50¢, as in English
- Siwash = sáwásh = ‘Native person’
- delate cumtux = dlét kə́mtəks = ‘really understand’.
That salmon species is Onchorhynchus tshawytscha, the Chinook salmon.
I’d like to track down a copy of the full book, to see if there’s more Chinuk Wawa in it.
Here’s more about Major Allan Brooks, who lived in the Okanagan country of British Columbia for decades.
