Didactic dialogues in CJ dictionaries: Part 6, Coombs’s “Interrogatories”
Found at the Royal BC Museum as a freestanding holding, a set of “English Conversation and Interrogatories Answered in Chinook” sent me searching for its source.
(Here’s a link to all installments in this mini-series.)
Image credit: Kalloch.org
The first thing I learned is that these dialogues were erroneously mentioned in Pilling 1893 as being published by an S.F. “Coones” (Seattle, WA: Lowman & Hanford, 1901).
This turned out to be Samuel Fuller Coombs (1831-1908), also known mistakenly as SF “Coomes”.
That Maine-born pioneer of 1859 also helped Joseph Costello to put together the book “The Siwash“, which I’ve previously discussed.
(Was SFC related to, maybe a grandfather or great-uncle of, George Coombs Shaw, born 1877, who published a CJ dictionary in Seattle in 1909 and was an employee of Lowman & Hanford?)
SF Coombs’s dictionary of Chinuk Wawa is extremely rare. I’m not sure I’ve ever looked at it much, but I found it for free at Archive.org.
A drawback to this particular book is that it’s full of typographical errors, but most of them are pretty obvious to a speaker of English and a person who’s already looked at other old Jargon dictionaries.
It turns out that one very badly spelled dialogue I’ve previously written about on this site is partially stolen from Coombs and/or from JK Gill’s 1882-edition dictionary!
It’s that perennial tradition of plagiarism in Chinook Jargon publishing.
Now to SF Coombs’s pages 33-34, with their heavily Settler-oriented dialogues.
The whole bit about ‘this country…I’ve always lived here…yes sir’ is lifted from JK Gill.
But starting from the ‘where did you get the blanket’ question onward, we seem to have original material, created by Coombs. Let’s look at it:
Where did you get the blanket?
Ka mika iss-kum po-se-se?
qʰá mayka ískum pásisi?
[This sentence plainly says just what Coombs claims.]Answer-I bought it of a Hudson Bay man.
Ni-ka iss-kum hool-hool capa King George Man.
nayka ískum-húyhuy kʰapa kʰinchóch-mán.
[But this sentence needs a couple of comments.
(1) It seems to fluently use the “silent IT” pronoun.
(2) (A) The expression ískum-húyhuy is new to us, and it has merits. It’s literally ‘to pick up (in) trade’ or ‘pick out (in) trade’, and that’s a neat idea for unambiguously expressing ‘buying’ without using the vague word mákuk ‘buy/sell’. However, Coombs’s dictionary only defines ‘buy’ as mar-kook. So I suspect his iss-kum hool-hool (apparently a misprint for iss-kum hooi-hooi) is his Settler romanticizing of a picturesque interaction from a previous time. By 1891, on Puget Sound, there was very little use in learning how to talk about trading with the HBC!
(B) Take note of the spelling capa for the preposition, suggesting a Grand Ronde-like kʰapa. This contrasts with ko-pa (kʰupa) below. Interesting variation going on.]Whom did you get the whisky of that made you drunk ?
Klas-ka man mi-ka iss-kum lum o-coke mam-ook pil-ton?
łaska mán mayka ískum lám úkuk mamuk-píltən?
[Again, commentary is called for.
(1) (A) The klas-ka here would literally mean ‘they’, but we know that in this Northern Dialect, folks indeed freely substituted this word and klaksta ‘who; which (one)’ for each other.
(B) And, fluent Jargon would want us to say capa klas-ka man ‘from which man/person’.
(2) Coombs is using o-coke ‘this; that’ as a relative subject pronoun ‘that; which’. This is a Settler way of talking, obviously influenced by English-language patterns. It’s not very fluent in Jargon, which normally would use “silent IT” as the relative pronoun. (Saying this another way, fluent use would not say any relative pronoun out loud here.)
(3) (A) Mam-ook pil-ton actually means ‘to make (someone) crazy; to drive insane’.
(B) And, fluent Jargon doesn’t allow an Active verb such as this to have an inanimate subject such as lum ‘whisky’. A more normal way of expressing what Coombs wants to say is, for example, …lum pe mi-ka chah-co pil-ton ‘…whiskey so that you got crazy’.]Answer-I do not know the man I got the whisky of.
Ni-ka wake cum-tux klas-ka man nika iss-kum lum.
nayka wík kə́mtəks łaska mán nayka ískum lám.
[See comments (1) (A) & (B) just above.]Good morning, sir.
Kla-how-ya, six.
łax̣á(w)ya, síks.
[(1) Kla-how-ya of course means ‘hello’ in general, not specifically ‘good morning’.
(2) Six means ‘friend’, not ‘sir’. Settlers sometimes projected their own English language onto this Jargon word to take it as the more formal ‘sir’.]Come here.
Chah-co yah-wa.
cháku yá(k)wá.
[This means just what Coombs claims.]I want four good Indians with a large canoe to take me to Olympia.
Ni-ka tik-eh lock-et klosh Si-wash ko-pa ikt hy-as ca-nim ko-pa lo-lo ni-ka ko-pa Olym-pia.
nayka tíki lákit łúsh sáwásh kʰupa íxt háyás kəním kʰupa lúlu nayka kʰupa olímpiya*.
[(1) The second ko-pa is Settler talk. Using this preposition to signal a verbal purpose is a reflection of English-language to. Fluent Jargon would say pus ‘for the purpose of; so that’.
(2) By 1891, it would be really unusual to be asking Native people to transport you somewhere, in the Puget Sound area. That’s because Settlers were already numerically dominant by that time, and helped each other out, in ways that included building roads.]How much will you charge me?
Kon-se dollar mi-ka tik-eh ?
qʰə́ntsi dála mayka tíki?
[This just means ‘How many dollars do you want?’]
A short summary comment: Coombs’s Northern-Dialect Chinook Jargon is pretty good.
It mainly suffers from the intrusion of English-language models.
The reason I speak of this as a deficit is that, although English legitimately did have a big influence in this dialect in1891, particularly in contributing new words to Jargon, the grammar was much less open to manipulation by an individual speaker.
