Ikta Dale McCreery yaka t’ɬap (Part 9: More Jargon from F. Boas)
(Masmasalaaniq mamuk kau eli kopa lamotai
= Masmasalaaniq mamuk-k’áw íliʔi kʰupa lámətáy
= ‘Masmasalaaniq tied the land to the mountains’, literally.’)
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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!
