Boas 1892: Many discoveries in a short article (Part 22: tail)
From Prof. Franz Boas’s brief 1892 article on “The Chinook Jargon“…
A noun that seems more at home in the Northern Dialect, but shows up in Southern!
Chinook tail (image credit: Rough Fish)
(Click here for the previous installments in this series.)
At Shoalwater Bay, Washington, Professor Boas learned this borrowing of English tail to be a word in local Chinuk Wawa use.
He wrote it phonetically as < tēl >.
As you may already know, the established word throughout all dialects of Chinook Jargon for expressing ‘tail’ and ‘butt(ocks)’ is úpʰuch. That’s a word from Lower Chinookan.
The completely wonderful 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary also gives the word tʰwín for ‘tail’, from just one of the elders. That one traces back to Warm Springs Sahaptin, which some might call Klickitat, I’d think.
“Tail” from English did also get borrowed into the Northern Dialect of Chinook Jargon, in British Columbia. There, we have examples like this sentence:
Iht rat klatwa sahali kopa latab, pi iaka
‘One rat climbed onto the table, and it’
mamuk klatwa iaka til kopa botl.
‘put its tail into the bottle.’— “Kamloops Wawa” #151 (April 1897), page 60
It’s relatively uncommon, for various fascinating reasons of history, to find the same English word in both the Southern and Northern dialects of Jargon.
So: neat find, Papa Franz!
