Hapi Nu Ya! And more.
Hapi Nu Ya!
That’s my understanding of how to pronounce the Northern Chinook Jargon phrase found in over a decade of Kamloops Wawa newspapers.
Image credit: Youtube
It’s written in Chinuk Pipa shorthand alphabet as Hapi Nyu Iir or Hapi Nyu Iiir.
That’s an attempt to show how the word was heard in local English, which was the source of numerous NCJ words.
But it also reflects Kamloops Wawa editor JMR Le Jeune’s familiarity with written English.
Judging from other English (and French) words that got loaned into Indigenous languages of our region, we can conclude that the “R” at the end was probably not pronounced.
And I would guess that “New” was often, or usually, more like Nu in local English of Kamloops. True, there would be more British dialect presence there than on the US side of the border. But because modern-day Kamloops English says Nu, I suspect it already said Nu in previous generations.
So Hapi Nu Ya 2026 (Hapi Noo Ya in the BC Learners Alphabet), and here’s to learning lots more words of Chinuk Wawa!
Bonus fact:
In conversation, I hear Southern-dialect Chinuk Wawa speakers say chxí kʰúl or the full expression chxí kʰúl-íliʔi for ‘New Year”. That’s literally ‘new winter’. Because, a ‘winter’ = ‘a year’ due to the Indigenous nature of this language.
So, ɬúsh chxí-kʰúl! = ‘Happy New Year!’
Among good speakers of this language, there’s a preference for economy. (I try to teach Chinook Jargon with a strong orientation towards brevity.) Shorter, quicker synonyms are favored over longer ones. This is why I personally wouldn’t choose the possible and sensible variant, “ɬúsh chxí-kʰúl!“.
In the North, we can validly say the same, in our preferred way: chhi sno. For that dialect, sno = ‘snow’ and ‘winter’ and ‘a year’. (Southern Speakers will understand this also. It’s in the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary.)
So, I also like Tloosh Chhi Sno — although it’s not known from any of our elder speakers.
There’s often more than one good way to express things, in any real language…Don’t you think? Haven’t you found? Isn’t it so? Am I right? Do you feel me? Does that make sense? 😁
