Ouch. Nope. HowToSayGuide.com
Thanks to JD Norton for this find! When you use Bing to search for “how to say hello in Chinook”, you may be directed to HowToSayGuide.com.
God help you.
The article there that’s credited to a “Rachel Stella” — a person unknown in our Chinook Jargon community — is a nightmare.
So maybe it’s an AI hallucination. I suspect it’s the verbal equivalent of how, when you use a search engine to shop for Chinook Jargon items, 99% of the results are auto-generated, print-on-demand, horrifyingly overpriced reproductions of old copyright-free dictionaries.
Predictably, and least offensively, the article notes you can say ‘hello’ as Klahowya. But it claims “the literal translation of Klahowya is ‘good’.” Ouch. Nope. The word means ‘poor; pitiful’.
We need to talk about how no actual sentences of Chinuk Wawa are provided by “Rachel Stella”. All you get for examples are English greetings with a non-English word thrown into them. Ouch. Nope.
The article gets worse & worse the more it talks. There’s a claim that Hiyu is a greeting. Ouch. Nope. That’s a word for ‘a lot’!
Where in hell did the writer/AI get hold of a word Ísti? What in hell is it?
As “regional variations”, the article claims Shoalwater Bay Tribe people greet each other with Shénešchin, and that some people say hi with the word Chenooks! Nonsense.
I love how the article ends by urging you to share it “to appreciate human effort” 🙂
But wait, there’s more. There’s also an article by a “Willie Ethan” on the same site, “How to Say Goodbye in Chinook“. It’s equally spectacular in its wrongness. We’ve never, ever heard of the supposed phrases Niika laak’st or Pee-wy.
Ouch. Nope.
