“Jagwire” and “silex”
I’ve made the point any number of times that English-literate Americans often spelled Chinuk Wawa’s /á/ with the letter < i >.
The classic example is the word for ‘angry’, sáliks, being spelled as silex.
Image credit: Top Electronics
Another is ‘pants, trousers’, sik’áluks, getting written as sickilox.
Yeah, but that’s all in the past, you might say.
And maybe it was just folks with a Southern drawl…the type who say /há/ for “high”.
(This one just isn’t true. There weren’t terribly many Southerners out here in the Pacific NW at the time. It was New Englanders more often.)
Anyways, we still do the same thing in American English, in 2024.
And it’s not just about spellings and literacy.
My whole entire life in Wa(r)shington State, I’ve heard folks refer to the fancy car they call a “Jagwire”. That’s a Jaguar, of course.
From the official spelling, you’d “know” to say /jægwar/.
But the most relevant dynamic is, we’re talking about talking. “Jagwire” comes from, and is kept alive by, people talking to each other. I bet you half a beer that when they write the word, the “Jagwire” pronouncers spell it as “Jaguar” nearly all the time.
This spoken-language association has a lot to do with the Chinook Jargon situation. CJ has always been primarily a spoken language, with scant thought of writing it, for the great majority of its users.
See what I’m saying?
Bonus fact:
The corresponding Anglophone spelling habit for stressed Chinook /á/, when it’s followed by a “w” sort of sound, is < ow >, as in the word for ‘leg’, tʰiyáʔwit, being spelled as tee-owitt.
Get it?
Folks who were used to thinking in English, and “feeling” a language’s phonology in English ways, tended to hear the single (albeit longish) sound /á/ as if it were an English diphthong, /áy/ or /áw/.
And this tendency is alive and well in the English of 2024, to prove the point for you.
[Editing later to add that in northeastern Washington state, I’ve heard Indigenous community members pronounce the personal name Antoine as “Antwine” [‘æntwayn].]
