Discovered at Kamloops Archives: a word list, and Chinuk Pipa words penciled in
Found by our friend Alex Code at the Kamloops (BC) Archives — naika wawa mirsi (thanks to) Alex for sharing!
This is a copy of the British Columbia missionary C.M. Tate’s little book “Chinook Jargon As Spoken by the Indians of the Pacific Coast”.
We’ve come to realize that there’s great added value when we find copies of old Chinuk Wawa dictionaries whose owners wrote additional information in them.
On this subject, see also:
- Bob Nims’s 1891 Gill with German Notes: Can You Read Them?
- 1868: S. Crease’s Personal Notes on Early Northern Dialect
Here are page images sent along by Alex showing how another person used their copy of a dictionary to preserve their own observations:
Above: penciled in “Chinook Shorthand Alphabet” and entries using it, as well as “shamar wahwah, White person’s talk”, i.e. the English language. This uses the Interior Salish word for White people, widely known in Chinook Jargon of the region — see shamma ‘White person of any kind’ in the last image below.
Above: “John H. Mobley, 717 Nicola St.” [in Kamloops]
Above: more shorthand (Chinuk Pipa) words penciled in.
Some added words in Chinook Jargon and in Nɬeʔkepmxcín (Thompson Salish). Note that this person must have gotten the latter by hearing them in person from someone who also spoke Jargon: a few are actually CJ (kultus ‘bad’, sufe-a-lulla ‘a bitter red berry’, oallie ‘saskatoon berry’, wale-em ‘rope’, mam-a-losse ‘die, dead’). And the entry cookshamah ‘thank you’ is indeterminate between Nɬeʔkepmxcín and the Secwepemctsín (Shuswap) Salish that’s local to Kamloops and was probably known by many Whites.
ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?
Great find, and thanks for sharing! If the marginalia was done by the person named on the cover, then this appears to be John F.[Fernie) Mobley, who resided in the Kamloops area at least through the 1920s-40s. He once served on the school board in the early 1940s. So this marginalia might be relatively late for CP. What might have been his interest in writing things down? E.W. [Bill] Veale, who typed in the addendum, also lived in the Kamloops area in the 1940s-60s, and seems to have owned a ranch in the Merritt area in the 1930s-early 40s. So he may have had reason to use or hear the language in social interactions.
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