1893, BC: “wowwow man” found
Here’s a new discovery in Jargon.
I take this person’s untranslated Chinuk Wawa phrase as genuine. His “wowwow man” seems to be wáwa-mán, literally ‘speech-man’.
Image credit: Wikipedia
Now that I’ve gotten “Wow Wow Wubbzy” off my mind, I think I can say something intelligent about “wowwow man”.
While it’s a new phrase to us, wawa-man strongly chimes with the traditional Native position of a “speaker” for a chief.
Here, that customary Indigenous idea looks to have been extended to an “interpreter”. Another genuine Northern Dialect phrase for that is Chinúk-mán.
The spelling “wowwow man” is possibly influenced by the North American English word “powwow”, in its sense of “conferencing, consulting, having a conversation”. That usage of “powwow” was well established before 1893.
But of course “wowwow” might be a newspaper editor’s or typesetter’s misreading of a handwritten “wawwaw”, which was not an uncommon spelling of wawa by Settlers. In fact I haven’t found any other occurrences of “wowwow” in published representations of Chinook Jargon!
“Clarke and I staid on the ranch six
days, when some fifty Chilcotins and
Kleenakleena [Kleena Kleene/Klinaklini] Indians made their appear-
ance, acting in a hostile manner, flour-
ishing their guns and talking native In-
dian. Their wowwow man at length or-
dered us away in Chinook, but we per-
sisted in remaining, and asked what
had become of McNeil. They replied,
‘Halo cumtucks,’ but on promising that
we would go away and not hunt on their
grounds they volunteered the information
that McNeil was dead.Among the Indians I know the chief
men of all the tribes, and I recognized in
the squad of siwashes before us ‘Old One
Eye,’ the notorious Jesse James of the
Squamish valley, an evil countenance,
once seen never forgotten.
— from “Very Bad Indians: Unsafe for White Men to Venture Up Squamish River”, in the Seattle (WA) Post-Intelligencer of December 18, 1893, page 8, columns 4 & 5
Oh yeah, in case you need this translated, “halo cumtucks” = hílu kə́mtəks = ‘dunno’!
