Boas 1892: Many discoveries in a short article (Part 19: ‘to sew’)
We’re in a mini-series that examines Prof. Franz Boas’s precious findings of lower Columbia River Chinook Jargon.
This is the variety of the Southern Dialect that I analyze as “re-creolized” Chinuk Wawa.
Bone needles (image credit: WorthPoint)
That’s to distinguish it from the “early-creolized” CW of the early Fort Astoria-Fort Vancouver era.
(Click here for the previous installments in this series.)
Today, let’s look at Boas’s report of a “new” word for ‘sew’ —
He writes this Jargon word as kyē′pot.
That’s k’ípʰwat, ‘to sew; needle, pin, awl’ in the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary of Chinuk Wawa.
This word is of Chinookan origin. The root (k’ípwa) shows up in at least Clackamas and Kathlamet, to our knowledge.
The -t at its end appears, by my research, to likely be from SW Washington Salish — specifically a Lower Chehalis form of the often-seen Instrument lexical suffix.
Lower Chehalis is a source of quite a large portion of “re-creolized” Chinuk Wawa material. This was largely overlooked until I was fortunate enough to be hired to document & analyze Lower Chehalis.
