Ikta Dale McCreery yaka t’ɬap (Part 14: a pattern)
Here’s another contribution from our friend, the linguist Dr. Dale McCreery.
(This was originally scheduled to be published as installment #11, oops!)
Here, he tells us about Chinook Jargon words that are found in the local Indigenous language where he lives, Nuxalk (“Bella Coola” Salish) on the BC coast.
Image credit: Lachilly
January 16, 2016: So a few more words from CJ in Nuxalk –
- slii, used for a sled or sleigh
[note by Dave here — lasli, evidently from Métis/Canadian French, is known elsewhere in British Columbia.]
- and finally that one missing word – taym for time – only used in an old recording, modern Nuxalk uses no word for time (at least no stand-alone word)
[Dave again — taim is known everywhere in the Northern Dialect of Chinook Jargon, so we’d expect it also in Bella Coola.]
- pliidii – for a day of the week, though I’m not certain which one
[DDR again — this one is super fascinating, because it may match up with famous naturalist John Muir’s report of the word “Friday” being used by Lingít a.k.a. Tlingit speakers of Chinook Jargon a bit farther north, to mean ‘shoreward’.]
- and “lisaak” for a bag!
[DDR: this is of course the usual Jargon word, and it’s found borrowed into a number of Indigenous languages.]It seems to be a pattern that some speakers use all the CJ borrowings, while others use English. But they all understand the CJ origin words.
I appreciate Dale’s independent observation of the same pattern I’ve seen in Northern Dialect CJ back to the 1890’s or earlier: English words tend to replace previously existing Jargon words.
