Suttles, “Musqueam Reference Grammar”, Part 9: It took a while for Jargon to reach north…
Naika wawa masi kopa Paisley pi Mokwst Alex, for reminding me of a great book by a great anthropological linguist!
Typically I’ll rake through a dictionary of a Pacific NW Indigenous language, and report to you here on the patterns of Chinook Jargon to be found there.
Wayne Suttles’ “Musqueam Reference Grammar“, however, isn’t a dictionary, and I don’t know of one that’s available to me for this particular variety of what some folks have called a single, wide-ranging “Halkomelem” Salish language.
So instead, I’ll snoop through the aforementioned grammar, and…
I’m going to give you a reaction video. 🤩
Just kidding, what I’m gonna do is write my reactions to everything Wayne said about Chinuk Wawa. He had more experience than any living linguist with the Jargon, for a good stretch of years. (Then he taught Henry Zenk, and wow, look what we’ve learned!)
• Page 577, properly recognizing that Chinuk Wawa was new among the Musqueam tribal people in the 1830’s (Wayne Suttles is very rare among anthropologists and linguists in recognizing this fact):
Early Vocabularies
Probably the earliest published example of Halkomelem [the language of which Musqueam is one variety] is a short Cowichan word list, one of a number of Northwest Coast vocabularies collected by W.F. Tolmie, probably in the late 1830s, and appended by John Scouler to “Observations on the Indigenous Tribes of the N.W. Coast of America” (Scouler 1841). The words are poorly recorded and some are wrongly identified, no doubt because of the difficulties Tolmie must have had eliciting them through the recently introduced Chinook Jargon.
