Previously uncredited / unknown Chinook writings by LN St Onge (and others)

Here’s another subject that a motivated student / grad student / scholar can turn into an excellent little research project and/or publication…

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Easy to spot, now that we’re well acquainted with an enormous amount of material from different writers in Chinuk Pipa, and with the differences between Northern & Southern dialects of Chinook Jargon.

Just within issue #49, we see several of the recurring diagnostics of Father St Onge’s CJ:

• The use of “kiwa” for ‘because’ is one big giveaway
• The use of “pus” instead of “kopa” to express ‘for’ (issue 49 has kopa crossed out & replaced by pus!)
• Rarer spellings like “pahlach / paxlach” rather than the usual “patlach“
• “Spaiol” for ‘Spanish’ rather than the usual Northern “Spanish” (Le Jeune inserts a comment that “Spaiol Ilihi” is called “Spain” in English and “L’Espagne” in French, both of these probably being more familiar around Kamloops than St Onge’s Southern-dialect word)

There are quite a few more indicators of St Onge’s authorship among the many early “Kamloops Wawa” issues that he seems to have contributed to, albeit he only received explicit credit once.

We seem to have confirmation here of something mentioned by “Kamloops Wawa” editor Father JMR Le Jeune, that St Onge provided the newspaper with a good amount of material to publish, but that Northern dialect readers had difficulties following all of it — due to the use of a number of unfamiliar words.

It appears Le Jeune kept gratefully publishing St Onge’s material, but edited it to make it more Northern.

Father St Onge is mentioned twice in “Kamloops Wawa” after his contributions stopped appearing. In 1898 there’s a letter from him to Le Jeune. And in 1901 is a telegram announcing his death.

Bonus fact: 

The nerdier ones among us may have wondered why St Onge’s name gets written as Sint Onsh in the Chinuk Pipa. We expect nasalized vowels, such as the “in” and on” there, to de-nasalize. So why isn’t it *Sit Osh*?

I can think of three reasons for the use of Sint in his name, two of them having to do with the high prevalence of English in the experience of southern BC Chinook Jargon speakers.

First, “Kamloops Wawa” is filled with mentions of actual saints, many of whom are referred to with the English-sourced Sint. Other saints, by the way, are called by the French-sourced Sa or Sin, and only if they’re female by French Sint.

And second, English pronunciations of French-origin names are by no means rare in “Kamloops Wawa”.

Third, “Kamloops Wawa’s” editor Le Jeune pretty often wrote French-origin names for his readers in a way that reflected standard French spellings, rather than actual pronunciations. Putting this in a more explanatory way, I can say Le Jeune tended to write any French names that were unfamiliar to southern BC folks according to their official French spellings — whereas lots of French names that were already established in the local communities here had mutated into “Chinook” pronunciations.

Bonus bonus fact:

There are other uncredited contributors to “Kamloops Wawa”. Among those who I can now recognize are Father JM Le Jacq, Bishop Paul Durieu, and Dr Thomas Sanderson Bulmer. Interesting to analyze how their uses of Chinuk Wawa differ, due to their different experiences of learning & speaking it!

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?