WA: Sequim Press, Part 4 (04/22/1921, “pepah wawa”)
Short & sweet!
(Here’s a link to all installments in this series.)
Image credit: 123RF
Here’s the entire “Jamestown” update from another issue of the same paper this series has been enjoying looking at:
JAMESTOWN
Delate klosh hiu Jamestown papah wawa.
— from the Sequim (WA) Press of April 22, 1921, page 2, column 3
Have you noticed how, through these years of blogging, I’ve taught that the shorter the message, the harder it can be to interpret?
This one’s kind of a stumper to me.
From elsewhere (not far away) in Northern Chinook Jargon territory, I’ve found the phrase < pepah wawa >, not really with an English translation but looking similar in essence. Sort of like “news” or “newspaper” (paper that tells)?
Is today’s sentence something like “All good, lots of Jamestown news”?
Or it an attempt at “It would be great if there were lots of Jamestown news”? We’d expect pus / spose before the hiu here, if that was the case.
That’s pretty interesting, as well as puzzling to me. I don’t have a solution for the puzzle right now. I first read “papah wawa” as “paper words” (so, likely words in the paper or words of the paper, etc.?), but I had a hard time forming a full logical sentence with that. Making it an if-clause with a pos/pus before hiyu (I’d prefer to spell it haiyoo) makes it almost fully the opposite meaning of what I first thought. If you are going with a missing “if” in there, it would mean that there were not any or nowhere near enough news out of Jamestown.
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