Suttles, “Musqueam Reference Grammar”, Part 10
Naika wawa masi kopa Paisley pi Mokwst Alex, for reminding me of a great book by a great anthropological linguist!
A place founded by Charles Montgomer Tate (image credit: Tracing Memory)
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!)
• Pages 577-578:
In 1882 the Roman Catholic missionary priest Fr. G.C. Donckele collected a vocabulary, now in the British Columbia Provincial Archives (Donckele 1882), of “la langue sauvage Cowichan” to complete a printed form evidently designed for use in French Oceania. It contains some interesting items but it is no better in the way it represents the sounds of the language. Fr. Donckele may have left other manuscripts on Halkomelem. I was told that he tried preaching in Halkomelem rather than the usual Chinook Jargon but was not very fluent. A Protestant missionary, the Reverend C.M. Tate, is also said to have learned Halkomelem well enough to translate hymns (see Pilling 1893, 67, where Halkomelem appears as “Ankomelum”). I was told that he could indeed communicate in the native language but amused people by mixing dialectal forms.
None of the Settlers who we’re told “spoke” the Indigenous languages besides Chinuk Wawa were all that great at it. They could make themselves understood in many circumstances. But I’m constantly finding not only testimony but linguistic evidence of their own misunderstandings.
That’s all, folks!
