(Masmasalaaniq mamuk kau eli kopa lamotai 
= Masmasalaaniq mamuk-k’áw íliʔi kʰupa lámətáy 
= ‘Masmasalaaniq tied the land to the mountains’, literally.’)

D

On April 30, 2017, our friend (now Dr.) Dale McCreery of BC shared in the big Facebook “Chinook Jargon” group…

Reading some [Prof. Franz] Boas today – he mentions an error he made based on Wawa.

…”my informant speaking Chinook [said] ‘Masmasalaaniq mamuk kau eli kopa lamotai,’ literally, ‘masmasalaniq tied the land to the mountains.’

But eli – land, here means the inhabitants of the country and not the land itself, so that the former version of the legend is incorrect.”

(Masmasalaaniq mamuk kau eli kopa lamotai 
= Masmasalaaniq mamuk-k’áw íliʔi kʰupa lámətáy 
= ‘Masmasalaaniq tied the land to the mountains’, literally.’)

Dale went on to ask,

Does anybody have more examples of Boas using Chinook?

He went on to answer his own question 😊

Because, just last week, Dale posted on the same FB group:

So if any of you haven’t looked at these before, this is one of Franz Boas’ field notebooks, and when I started going through it, there are some pretty significant sections written in the wawa.

That’s a link to Boas’s 1886 field notebooks, where he took down some storytelling in Chinuk Wawa by a Tsimshian man.

I’ve been working on those materials for a few years now, and even though they’re hard to read, there’s a large amount of excellent Northern Dialect CW.

Thanks as always to Dale McCreery for bringing up fascinating material in Jargon!

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?