1882, BC: A Jargon “happy belated New Cold-Hot”, and a Greek joke

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Definitely one for our Chinuk Wawa-related humor file…and it contains a word discovery!

In January of 1882, a 26-year-old priest still fairly new to North America sent his boss belated New Year’s greetings in many languages.

Here’s what Father JMR Le Jeune OMI’s good wishes looked like in several of those languages:

The first 3 languages are Le Jeune’s native Breton (the Celtic language of NW France, including some obvious French loan words), French, and Latin, and then there’s the “Greek”:

῾Αί δοντ νω γρίκ ἐνηφ τοῦ οὕισς ἰοῦ ἐ ἁππι νίου ἰιρ ἰν γρίκ.

The joke here, I eventually realized after laboring over it, is that that’s using Greek letters as phonetics to say in English, “I don’t know Greek enough to wish you a happy New Year in Greek.” 😊😊 

That’s followed by proper English, and then a good translation of all the above into perhaps the earliest Chinook Jargon we have from Le Jeune:

Naïka teke tlous kopa maïka 
‘I want good things for you’

oukouk chi col-wam(;) 
‘this new year;’ 

naïka teke pous elo maïka 
‘I want you to not’ 

sik, pous elo maïka
‘be sick, for you to not’ 

klahawiam, pi pous
‘be pitiful/poor, and for’ 

maïka kro kopa Sahale
‘you to reach Hea-‘

Elehe pous maïka mimelous.
‘ven when you die.’ 

All of this is very good, normal Northern Dialect Chinuk Wawa.

The new word discovery here is col-wam for ‘year’. And that’s a very sensible way to express the concept. Corresponding to the Southern Dialect spellings kʰúl & wám, this is literally ‘cold-hot’. 

And, it uses normal Northern Dialect grammar, with a “silent AND” when two things pair up naturally without us having to use the conjunction. So in Northern talk, this word for a ‘year’ is clearly a ‘cold (season) and (a) hot (season)’. 

You see, throughout the Jargon’s history, it’s been equally valid to refer to a ‘year’ as 

  1. kʰúl-íliʔi (‘cold land / the land is cold’),
  2. wám-íliʔi,
  3. kʰúl, or 
  4. wám.

So now we have a logical 5th synonym for ‘year’! 

I probably shouldn’t mention how, thanks also to Le Jeune, we have at least one more Northern Jargon word for ‘year’, shilalam!

Not to mention how we frequently find Hapi Nyu Iir written in the “Kamloops Wawa”…

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?
And can you say it in Jargon?

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