What Taa-laa-wa Dee-ni’ a.k.a. Tolowa (CA/OR coast Athabaskan) has to do with Chinook Jargon
We are living in fortunate times. Lots of Indigenous-language resources are generously being shared online.
It used to be extremely hard to get hold of these kinds of reference sources, even just 10 years ago.
Image credit: Tolowa Dee-ni’ Nation
My attention has come to the rather wonderful Taa-laa-wa Dee-ni’ dictionary. That is, to linguists’ way of classifying things, Tolowa/Smith River California/Oregon Coast Athabaskan.
In it, the usual case applies — lots of obviously borrowed words in Taa-laa-wa Dee-ni’ are ultimately from English; it can be hard to tell whether they came via Chinuk Wawa. Such are ‘rooster’, ‘sheep ram’, ‘coffee’, ‘garlic’, ‘Connecticut’, ‘corn off the cob’, ‘government’, ‘cabbage’, ‘beans’, ‘lettuce’, ‘apple’, ‘apricot’, and so forth. Normally, us historical linguists would think that the rampant replacement of English /k/ with Taa-laa-wa Dee-ni’ /k̓/, and so on, indicate that the words were loaned relatively long ago, but I suspect they may’ve been consciously Indigenized. Folks have a right to do what they want with their languages.
There’s also ‘mule’, muu-la, which might be (as is the word in Northern Chinook Jargon of BC!) from Spanish. Hmm.
To answer the question in today’s blog title, Taa-laa-wa Dee-ni’ has very little to do with Chinuk Wawa.
I’ve only turned up a handful of words in it that we can suggest a Chinook Jargon source for, in some instances just because they’re awfully antiquated English otherwise:
- ‘Chinese’ Ch’aa-nv-mvn
(letter <v> = /ə/; dashes just separate syllables instead of suggesting morphological info). This may have come via English rather than Chinook Jargon. - ‘quarter coin’ naa-xee-bit, literally ‘2 bits’; bit shows up nowhere else in the dictionary. “Bit” may also have come in via English, not Jargon.
- ‘cow’ mush-mush, definitely from the Jargon. Via some neighboring language?
- ‘whiteman’s money’ natlh-mii~-t’i waa-ghe chik Not related to Chinuk Wawa, but definitely a loaned word…
(~ nasalizes the preceding vowel) This one is more complex.- natlh-mii~-t’i is ‘Whiteman’ (literally ‘knife-people’, perhaps analogous to Lakota and other languages calling 1800s US soldiers ‘long-knives’ for their swords).
- waa-ghe chik (implicitly 2 words, from the spelling) shows up nowhere else in the dictionary. Here it’s good that we know the Yurok (an Algic language of NW California neighboring Taa-laa-wa Dee-ni’ to the southward) phrase ‘woogey ‘we-cheeek ‘White money’, also documented in a foreign-language rendition in the unrelated Karuk of NW California as < waugie chick > ‘silver white man’s money’. It sure looks like Taa-laa-wa Dee-ni’ is using the latter, instead of a direct loan from Yurok. It seems possible to me that this word was received via the medium of Chinuk Wawa. Plus, in Yurok, it’s etymologically related to the term ‘olh we-cheeek ‘Indian money’, which is the source of Chinook Jargon’s alíkʰuchik ‘dentalium’ (tusk shells, Indigenous money).
- It’s also good to know that there’s a purely native Taa-laa-wa Dee-ni’ synonym: natlh-mii~-t’i tr’ee-de’, where tr’ee-de’ is ‘money owned/possessed’.
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Anyhow, natlh-mii~-t’i waa-ghe chik is basically ‘Whiteman’s Whiteman’s dentalium’!
To answer the question in our title today, this language has virtually nothing to do with Chinook Jargon.
That’s all I’ve got for you today!
