1918, AK: Humor about Chinuk Wawa
Enough readers of this post-frontier era Alaskan newspaper understood Chinook to make it worth publishing the following joke.
I imagine “Alaska Pioneer” is the name of another newspaper.
Alaska Pioneer wah-wah copa okoke: “Cumtux
this Wah-wah?” “This?” Yakah Boston man’s wah-
wah. Cloxta mesatchee pe “Okoke?”
— from the Juneau (Alaska) Empire of October 10, 1918, page 4, column 2
A rough and ready translation:
“The Alaska Pioneer talks about this: ‘Understand “this” word?’ “This?” It’s a White people’s word. What’s wrong with “Okoke?” “
Cloxta mesatchee pe “Okoke?” (Tlaksta mesachi pi okok?)
I must admit this stumped me for a bit. I am always thinking of “tlaksta” as “who”, never “what”. And I wasn’t familiar with pe/pi in the sense of “with” or “about”. I would have expected kopa.
Is this obviously broken late post-frontier era CJ? Is there something typically Alaskan in it?
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Very good questions! Yes, I take it as “rusty” Jargon — it couldn’t have come from looking into a published dictionary, I’m guessing. It may then indicate someone’s vague memory of how the language worked in say Washington. That “pe” sounds much like the Jargon documented by Ulrich E Fries in his book “From Copenhagen to Okanogan”, which I wrote a number of articles about on this website.
I think if there’s anything typically Alaskan about today’s CJ sentence, it’s that it’s CJ in decline.
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Thank you very much for your reply. It’s highly appreciated. I’ll happily look up From Copenhagen to Okanogan as well. The brokenness of the Jargon here seems especially blatant if you read the last sentence as “Who [is] sinful *and* this?”, but the writer’s intended meaning was “What’s bad about ‘this’?”
Let me try re-writing the whole entry in the proper Northern CJ you taught me:
Alaska Pioneer wawa kopa okok: “M(s)aika kumtuks okok tenas-wawa?” “This?” (rather: “Okok?”) Okok Boston-man-tenas-wawa. Ikta mesachi kopa “okok?”
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I would add that English-speakers often had difficulty distinguishing the different Jargon words that they translated as “bad”. Possibly the most appropriate one here would be “kultus” (no-good, worthless).
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