More humor in Chinuk Wawa: Quilchena, automobile, what have you
Today’s tidbit is from an issue of Kamloops Wawa that was only in French…
Image credit: HowToPronounce.com
So I’ll just summarize what’s found there.
(A link to much more humor on my website…)
This is the issue of July 1916 (No. 264, printed together with No. 263).
The editor (and the only writer) of the paper, Father JMR Le Jeune, gets on the subject of the northern Syilx (“Okanagan”) Salish village of Quilchena. This leads him to a humorous meditation on the meaning of that name.
Le Jeune sees its as containing quil = ‘red’ from the Okanagan language, with j’hanh’ = ‘stone’ or ‘rock’ in the Nlakapmax (“Thompson”) Salish language.
“Natives ought to observe the rules of etymology” — he’s joking that they’re mixing their languages irresponsibly!
A proper Okanagan word for ‘stone’, he says, is h’tlôt, while a proper Thompson word for ‘red’ is schiewkh’.
Neither an Okanagan nor a Thompson Indian could’ve created the combination ‘Quilchena’!
Le Jeune compares this to an article in the Paris Croix 10-12 years back, which observed that the word ‘automobile’ is incorrectly formed, being partly from Greek and partly from Latin. The word should be ‘poly-poly-toto-cynema-termomax’, he quotes the French newspaper with amusement.
(Also funny to me: Le Jeune is remembering this word phonetically, perhaps due to his decades of writing in the Chinuk Pipa alphabet. It must originally have appeared in the “Croix” as polypolytautocinémathermomax!)
Father Rohr, another BC missionary, once asked him how anyone could possibly remember such a word; Le Jeune promised to make it impossible for him to forget it, and told four little Indigenous girls, ages eight to ten, who were present, that he was giving them new names. (Seeing as how priests then were baptizing people with new Colonial names, this would be believable to them.)
The first was to be called ‘Poly-poly’, the second ‘Toto’, the third ‘Cynema’ and the fourth ‘Termomax’.
He asked each one to tell him her new name, then called them in order, ‘Poly-poly, Toto, Cynema, Termomax!’
