Why are 1% of the hyphens in St Onge’s handwritten dictionary historically amazing?
Good old Louis-Napoléon St Onge put a dash virtually everywhere he could think of, in his manuscript dictionary of the Central Dialect around 1890.
The guy didn’t like spaces!
Image credit: Lingualism
So, sometimes it seems like he thought every phrase was some kind of compound word or something. (Much as Melville Jacobs did half a century later in his published grammar of Chinook Jargon, 1932.)
As I work on publishing St Onge’s big contribution, I’ve learned to remove those hyphens.
One subset of these punctuation marks that gave me pause, however: those that are “inside” of single words.
On the one hand, it’s a big “duh” to turn his tom-tom into tomtom for ‘heart’. There is no word *tom* known in Jargon, no matter how many uninformed rumors fly around.
But on the other hand, in about 1% of all words he documents, there’s a dash that I think has meaning. Here’s a sample of such words:
- a-a ‘magpie’ — compare Cowlitz Salish ʔánaʔan̓
- tlok-olh^ ‘wide’ — compare Grand Ronde Chinuk Wawa ɬə́q’əɬ
- tle-el ‘black’ — compare GRCW ɬíʔil
- spo-oh^ / spo-ak ‘light blue’ — compare GRCW spuʔuq
- ia-im ‘story’ — compare GRCW yáʔim
In these words, the dash consistently shows up where we know we should find a glottal stop /ʔ/, or else a “glottalized”/ejective consonant such as /q’/.
This 1% is noteworthy! Virtually nobody in 1890 who wrote down Chinook Jargon words was clearly hearing or clearly writing Indigenous glottal sounds!
St Onge was ahead of the crowd.
That’s one reason I find his work to be highly valuable.
I’m not alone. The 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary makes extensive reference to St Onge…
It’s high time we made his documentation of the Jargon publicly available.
