On the question of the earliest alíkʰuchik in Chinook Jargon
The 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary of Chinuk Wawa uses anthropologist Albert Gatschet’s 1877 field notes of Tualatin K’alapuya language for evidence that alíkʰuchik, in the English translation of one word, “argues for its contemporary currency also in local Chinuk Wawa”.
I have no argument with that diligently discovered evidence.
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It got me thinking, what’s the earliest documented evidence of alíkʰuchik ‘dentalium, a valued shell’ in Chinook Jargon proper?
It’s not to be found in François-Norbert Blanchet’s dictionary published by SJ McCormick in Portland, Oregon, in any of the editions of 1869, 1878, 1883, 1887, or 1889.
It is in Louis-Napoléon St Onge’s (died 1901) undated ms. as alik-achik ‘shell-money’. (Synonym: kups-kups.) I’m aware that he included a few words that he’d found in other people’s work…So I kept searching.
Samuel V Johnson’s 1978 dissertation, compiling quite a lot of the early published CJ vocabularies, indicates this word only in JK Gill’s 1909 dictionary. Gill, as he notes in the introduction to his various editions, bought the rights to the above-noted Blanchet dictionary, and added further material.
This word is actually in JK Gill’s dictionary earlier, by the 1884 10th edition, as ál-le-ka-cheek ‘shell money (the small)’, synonym coops-coops. This is early enough for Father St Onge to have copied it, in his more phonetic notation.
Gill’s influential 1909 edition gives it as “al’-lĭ-kå-cheek’ (?)”, with a question mark, as if copied from someone else’s handwritten notes. The definition given is ‘a small shell worn as an ornament for the ear’. Unlike coop-coop, as that synonym is spelled in 1909, this word is nowhere cross-indexed with hy’-kwå ‘shell money or wampum’. So it seems like an outlier term…
That unknown person whose notes may have supplied Gill with ál-le-ka-cheek / al’-lĭ-kå-cheek’ (?) might have been Reverend WC Chattin, who is credited on page 4 (1909) with having given “us the advantage of his experience in the use of Chinook among our Indians.”
I’ve shown this word to trace ultimately to northwest California’s Yurok language, via “local English” and presumably Chinuk Wawa. It may be highly relevant that Chattin had experience working at Siletz reservation in Oregon, where quite a number of Indigenous folks from NW CA and SW OR wound up living.
In summary, it looks to me like alíkʰuchik could have been a genuine Chinook Jargon word, in parts of the Oregon coast, in the reservation era. It probably died out soon, as Indigenous culture changed under all of that assimilatory pressure.
