1885, Roseburg OR: Siwash memaloose Boston man? And Settler phonetic clues
We can understand the un-translated Chinook here…
Joseph Emery (1833-1924) (image credit: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Emery)
…but can we grasp what it’s saying?
We find that Prof. Emery’s appointment
gives universal satisfaction. Now he can klat-
awa siah kopa limata. Siwash memaloose
Boston man.
— from the Roseburg (OR) Review of August 28, 1885, page 3, column 2
(https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn93051663/1885-08-28/ed-1/seq-3/)
Like the average reader of the Roseburg Review in 1885, we know what the Chinuk Wawa is saying there.
The Jargon there tells us that he can…
…łátwa sáyá kʰupa lámətáy. (‘Go off to the mountains.’)
And that…
sáwásh míməlus bástən-mán. (‘Natives have killed a White man.’) This uses Settler-style grammar, where the single word míməlus functions as ‘kill’, rather than the normal Jargon mamuk-míməlus (which is literally ’cause to die’).
Without any further contextual info, we can’t be very sure of the intended verb tense in that last comment, or whether it’s connected with some actual event. Here’s what I’ve turned up so far, and it seems quite relevant:
Rev. L. M. Nickerson, a member of this Conference has resigned
his position as Indian Agent, and Professor Emery of the M. E.
Church, South; has been appointed in his place.
— from page 25 of the Official Journal of the Oregon Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church
(https://www.google.com/books/edition/Official_Journal_of_the_Session_of_the_O/R_2sNxzS-H0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=professor+emery+roseburg+oregon&pg=PA25&printsec=frontcover)
Bonus fact:
That spelling limata for ‘mountains’ seems to be another example of English-literate Settlers spelling a long, stressed /á/ in Chinook Jargon with the letter < i >. In this case, it’s evidence that local folks were indeed putting the stress on the first syllable of the word, as opposed to the last syllable, which is the other commonly documented pronunciation.
(If this letter < i > is not standing for /á/, it’s a bizarre way to represent the other possible pronunciation, an unstressed /a/ or /ə/. This seems unlikely to me.)
And the leter < a > at the end of limata is surely to be understood as sounding like /ey/, that is, what English-literate people call the “long a” sound!
