Chinook Jargon in the wild: Elep Avenue
I was talking with an older lady who lives in Colville, Washington, who told me of an “Amish” street name there…
I’d driven through that town any number of times, and noticed < Elep > Avenue.
For want of a more relevant illustration (image credit: Amazon)
I always inferred that that’s a classic Settler use of Chinook Jargon: our íləp means ‘first’ and it means ‘forewards’.
Both fit the White colonizer mindset 😁 The latter is more likely, since Colville also has a “First Avenue”…
Anyhow, when I was asking her whether I was getting the pronunciation right (and she confirmed it’s said just as in Jargon), she accomodated my expression of interest by adding — “It’s a big Amish name.”
Whoa!
Now, I expect Amish, or the vastly more frequent northeast WA Hutterite and Mennonite, names to be of German derivation. There are lots of folks named Gross around here, for instance. I can imagine a Teutonic name ending in unstressed /əp/, such as Weilep (a Spokane name).
But my online searching so far hasn’t turned up any folks named “Elep” or similar spellings that might sound like that. And none in connection with Anabaptists.
And considering that Colville, WA is named for one of the very earliest settlements, the nearby fur-trade Fort Colvile (with one “L”), I’m still convinced that Elep Avenue is Chinuk Wawa-inspired. (Not that I’ve managed to find proof of this, either!)
But it’s wonderful every time to learn the linguistic folklore around Indigenous names in our region.
