Why it’s hard to decide what the Northern Chinook Jargon word for a ‘car’ is
In our fun (I say awesome because I’m from the 80s) Northern Chinook Jargon sessions, sometimes lately we’ve talked about how to say ‘a car’.
Now, I’m the first one to admit, NCJ is pretty freaking steampunk…Wouldn’t you be, working with high-powered equipment in canneries, logging sites, and railroad camps?
Chinook steampunk (image credit: Redbubble)
…Certainly most of our information on CJ, and we have tons of info on it, comes from when? The 1890s!
I guessed we could just call a car a kar.
Because NCJ loved to borrow English words for the latest tech! (All around BC we find that folks used the word kar or ka for ‘train cars’ in Jargon, and even in their Indigenous languages.)
But…when I went checking what the English-speakers of the Gay Nineties were calling cars, I hit a speed bump.
Among other issues, the word (or phrase) “auto-mobile” only referred to a kind of torpedo (!).
This lasted until some time in 1895 in BC newspapers.
And then it became a quoted French phrase, voiture auto-mobile. (‘A self-moving carriage’!)
By some time in 1896, auto-mobile was used by itself as a more or less English word, but still in reference to a new French invention.
It’s not until 1897 that I find a Canadian newspaper discussing “automobile” as a hometown concept.
Only around 1900 do we start finding automobiles in Britsh Columbia.
I imagine the early synonyms “motorcar” and “autocar” were no less rare until that time.
And about that point in history, our Northern-dialect Chinuk Wawa evidence starts to run out of gas.
There’s less and less Chinook that was being written down after 1900.
So we’re broke down by the side of the track we were on, just when BC English-speakers were about to start having some widely accepted word or other for ‘cars’.
I’ll confess: we don’t have a good idea what BC folks woulda called ‘a car’ in Jargon back in the day.
We know other regions just called it a t’síkt’sik. Y’know, the old word for ‘a wagon’.
Sometimes they specified: páya-t’síkt’sik. ‘A fire wagon!’ Which also meant ‘a train’. Because it’s all about the internal combustion. (See “Trains (Not Planes or Automobiles) in Upper Chehalis“!)
Some folks who used Northern Chinook Jargon a lot wound up borrowing the word ‘automobile’ into their tribal languages (sometimes Indigenized, like ʔatnopil). That fact suggests to us what they were calling these vehicles in CJ, would you agree?
So at least we have a couple of possible answers to what to call your hoopty in Jargon.
Bonus fact:
Speaking of trains: some coastal Native cultures of BC and beyond wound up calling trains the words in their languages for ‘steamboat in the forest’.
That’s very much like the thought process that had led Chinook Jargon to use its word for ‘wagon’ to refer to ‘trains’ and ‘cars’, yeah?
