A rare Jargon word hidden in a Lower Chinookan tale?
I had an extra reason to be glad I came to the Joe Peter group this week on Discord*!
We were working on Joe Peter’s 1941 audio recordings where he translates stories previously told by Q’ltí (Charles Cultee) in Lower Chinookan, into Central Dialect Chinuk Wawa.
Since our group follows the English translation of those stories for a good reason (they’re used by the field researcher prompting Mr Peter), we missed one neat point.
For whatever reason, Franz Boas’s English version in “Chinook Texts” edited out the Lower Chinookan text’s following remark (page 27) about some wood that a character tossed onto the ground:
Gō2m nē’xau.
Gum it made.
In a more modern phonological spelling, that’s /gú•m níxaw/.
But you’ve probably already spotted what caught my eye — the word for ‘gum’, as in ‘pitch’.
It’s almost certainly not from English, where the word is /gə́m/.
It sure is a close match with Chinook Jargon’s /lakúm/!
That’s a word from Métis/Canadian French, la gomme.
I would be unsurprised if locally some speakers of Jargon also used a variant form /kúm/.
JK Gill’s famous 1909 Chinook Jargon dictionary, page 50, in fact gives us “goom, or la-goom” for ‘pitch; resin’!
No other dictionary that I know of has this short “goom” form.
So, it would seem as if Q’ltí confirms Gill’s claim.
Nice to find!
* The Joe Peter group currently meets on Tuesdays at 7pm West Coast time, on Discord. Details by request.
