Why to use skepticism when you think you’ve found a Jargon word out there (#HireALinguist!)
Look:
This image is from a northern Pacific NW document from ~150 years ago that I won’t identify.
It says, “marraine Marguerite Etlana“, I believe.
That’s French for “(the) godmother (was) Marguerite Etlana“.
Etlana must be an Indigenous name.
Certain of the oldest Chinook Jargon dictionaries (data from nearly 200 years ago, from the Columbia River) will tell you etlana, in various spellings such as itlana, is a Chinuk Wawa word —
— meaning “fathom, yard” (a unit of measure).
So if you’re well-read in the CJ dictionary literature, maybe you’ll think, “Wow, I just found someone with a real Chinuk Wawa name!”
But.
Don’t.
Because:
- An enormous degree of change occurred in Chinook Jargon between ~200 and ~150 years ago.
- The Columbia River (“Central”) Dialect and the Northern Dialect of CJ differ greatly in vocabulary.
The upshot being, way up north, folks didn’t know the word etlana / itlana in Chinuk Wawa.
There’s also this:
3. Nobody had Chinuk Wawa names that were simply a unit of measurement, that I’ve ever found.
4. Nobody in the north (here being New Caledonia i.e. British Columbia) had any CW family names by ~150 years ago, that I’ve found.
I say all of this on the same day that I’ve written a post debunking a linguistic urban legend about the Jargon.
Let’s avoid starting any more such!
All it takes is critical thinking + finding a sufficient amount of relevant information.
Or, in effect, an expert. #HireALinguist!, such as myself.
(There are those who start out thinking “AI” and “LLM’s” can do all this work for us, with endangered languages such as Chinuk Wawa, but then discover that it still takes human linguists to explain absolutely everything to the LLM/AI!
For most of the world’s 7,000 languages, it will remain most efficient and most economical to #HireALinguist!)
