Roy I Rochon Wilson’s Chinook Jargon (Cowlitz Tribe): an opportunity
My comment on Roy I. Rochon Wilson’s (1927-1925) Chinuk Wawa:
Image credit: egreenway.com
If you don’t participate in a community of speakers of an essentially unwritten language, you won’t be speaking it in an understandable way.
I own a copy of Wilson’s book of the Gospel of John.
(this image from it is courtesy of Alex Code)
I find his Chinook Jargon incredibly hard to understand — despite my 30 years of work speaking it, and having my PhD in Linguistics on it.
There is a simple reason.
Wilson “translated” from an English-language edition of the Christian Bible in the following way:
He looked up each word of the English, one after the other, and simply strung together the Chinook words that he amassed.
(More or less the same way people come up with “your name in Ancient Egyptian” or “Chinese” tattoos.)
That’s not how you talk any language on Earth.
Really shame that. (This is me pulling the reverse, doing a literal word-by-word translation from Chinook into English, with an inadequate outcome, trying to express:) That’s a shame.
I believe Wilson may have grown up hearing some Central-Dialect Jargon, an incredibly vital and important language for his people, the Cowlitz Tribe.
And he did many incomparably great things for the tribe.
But I wish I and other speakers of fluent Chinuk Wawa had been able to hang around with him while he was alive…
It would have been wonderful to witness the potential results of an encounter between his deep and lively mind and a strong grasp of this language.
Thinking optimistically: Roy Wilson laid the groundwork for a truly great restoration of an overlooked dialect of Chinuk Wawa to the Cowlitz Tribe —
— who used to speak it so much, it was even the language of their business meetings!
