More Salish ‘baby’ words in Northern Chinuk Wawa
Another ‘baby’ has been found!
Thanks to Leo Barker for this one.
Here’s one line of a hymn in Jargon from Zacharie Picotte OMI, circa 1896:
Na Jesus tanas scrakalah
Put into a modern phonemicized Chinook Jargon orthography, the first 3 words there are something like:
ná, djísəs*, tənəs …
‘hey, Jesus, (you) little…’
That, already, is identifiable as either the historic Central dialect of the Columbia River, or else the newer Northern Dialect that’s typical of British Columbia.
We know that Picotte worked among the Stó:lō people of BC’s lower Fraser River, so the word < scrakalah > is easy to connect with their Coast Salish language, where:
‘baby’ is sqá:qele or sqáqele.
The letter “a” there represents a sound /æ/ like in English “hat”. The letter “e” is a schwa sound, sort of like English “uh”.
Consulting a half-dozen dictionaries of Coast Salish languages, the next closest match I found was in nearby Sechelt Salish, with < s-kákel-álh > ‘little mite, small helpless child’. (To my ears there’s a British influence there, in calling a baby a ‘mite’.) If you could put the Sechelt word into the Stó:lō alphabet, it would be something like sqóqelólh.
So anyways, the hymn lyric from Picotte is saying, ‘Hey, Jesus, (you) tiny baby’.
I find it really fascinating that we keep finding local and regional preferences within Chinook Jargon for which word is used to say ‘baby’!
na tiki wawa sqakələ kʰapa na tenas!