Polynesians in Chinuk Wawa
A fine single source on the words for Polynesians in Chinuk Wawa is Louis-Napoléon St Onge’s manuscript dictionary of the Central Dialect.
I’ve had a fair number of inquiries from people about this subject over the years.
Image credit: TeePublic
St Onge mentions 2 words that have shown up in plenty of other Jargon dictionaries as well:
- < kanaka >, which is from the Hawai’ian word for ‘a person’; you’ll also find it kept alive in the British Columbia place names Kanaka Bar and Kanaka Creek
- < owaihi > ~ < waihi >, which is from “Hawai’i”, and is preserved in the Idaho place name(s) Owyhee and in the Secwépemc family name Wai
There’s also
- /wahúʔ/
…which we find as a trace in Colville-Okanagan Nsyilxcn (an Interior Salish language) — thanks to Professor W. Wilfried Schuhmacher, who mentioned this to me when we ran into each other in Alaska once! (Get yourself a free JSTOR account to read his scholarly paper and a zillion others.) We can infer that this word too was understood in Chinook Jargon. (Although it’s not mentioned in Drechsler & Makuakane 1982.) It comes from the island name, O’ahu, presumably a source of many of the Polynesian laborers in the Pacific NW fur trade.
Bonus fact:
With your free JSTOR account, you can also read the brilliant Willem J. De Reuse’s article about “English Loanwords in the Native Languages of the Chukotka Peninsula” of Siberia facing North America. There, as in Drechsel & Makuakane 1982, you can learn about English/pidgin Hawai’ian/Chinese Pidgin English words that got circulated by the whaling trade back in the day to Inuit and other Far North cultural areas. These include kaukau ‘food’.
Also noted by De Reuse are the loaned pusi– for ‘cat’ and lum/ram for ‘any type of liquor’ — remind you of Chinuk Wawa?
