Lempfrit’s legendary, long-lost, linguistic legacy (Part 23: how to menace etc.)
Containing at least seeming new discovery, here’s the last of the vocabulary-listing pages in Father Honoré-Timothée Lempfrit’s little-known document; next up will be some texts!
The 23nd pair of pages (mis-numbered as “22” on the original page) from this precious document again brings us plenty of stuff worth knowing about Chinook Jargon:
(Here’s a link to the other posts in this mini-series.)
Image credit: Endless Press
Where you see me underlining stuff here, it’s material that was added by the manuscript’s writer HT Lempfrit, from his good personal knowledge of the Jargon.
“[SIC]” shows that someone mis-wrote a word. It wasn’t necessarily Lempfrit, since he was copying from someone else’s manuscript, Modeste Demers’ now-lost original to be exact.
So, where I’m showing differences between Lempfrit & somebody else, it’s Alphonse Pinart’s “Anonymous 1849” copy that I’ve been able to compare with.
Where you see [le]tters in square brackets, they’re not visible on the page copy that I’m working from, but we infer that they really are there!
By the way, the notation ___ means that the preceding entry is repeated in that position, along with some additional word(s).
See if you recognize words in these unusual spellings! I think we have a couple more small discoveries today, again showing the value of examining every Chinuk Wawa document — even those that appear to be straight copies of each other!
7e espèce de mots: ‘7th sample of words:’
Conjonctions ‘Conjunctions.’
- pi – et, mais ‘and; but’
- pi weh̃t / alta weh̃t encore, outre cela ‘also; beyond that’
(Literally ‘and also; now also’.)- pi weh̃t ni, non plus ‘nor; either’:
- mais on sépare weh̃t de pi et on le renvoie à la fin, v.g.
‘but we separate weh̃t from pi and send it back to the end, for example:’
- Wek maïka tlatoua na? Tu n’y vas pas? ‘Aren’t you going there?’
(Pinart 1849 lacks the na, but has this same meaning.)- Wek, non ‘No.’
- Pi wek naika weh̃t, Ni moi non plus. ‘Me neither.’
(Literally, ‘And not me also.’)
8e espèce de mots: ‘8th sample of words:’
Interjections ‘Interjections’
- hēlō pour marquer admiration, surprise ‘for marking admiration [perhaps ‘amazement’], surprise’
- hsi pour menacer(,)* en appuyant fortement ‘for threatening(,)* by pressing hard’
(Pinart 1849 has the comma. Is this a new discovery for us?) - ănā pour marquer une admiration causée par la joie, ou par la douleur, mais dans le derner cas il faut prolonger beaucoup la syllabe, et baisser la voix en achevant.
‘for marking an admiration [perhaps ‘amazement’] caused by joy, or by pain, but in the latter case it is necessary to prolong the syllable a lot, and lower the voice when finishing.’
