Respected elder Dr Louis Miranda tells you what Northern Chinook Jargon is like (Part 3: tloosh)
More from the Youtube video “Louis Miranda: Squamish elder teaches Chinook Jargon“.
(A link to all installments in this series.)
Image credit: The Polygon Podcast
On June 18, 1973, Chief, and Doctor, Miranda of the Skwxwú7mesh people recorded this absolutely precious document of super-fluent Northern Chinook Jargon.
In this mini-series, I honor his knowledge by examining what “Uncle Louie” teaches us, word by word.
I’ll show words in their “BC Learners Alphabet” spellings, and I’ll make any comments I feel to be appropriate.
Click on the Jargon word to hear Dr Miranda himself telling about it!
TODAY’S WORD:
‘good’
(starts at 1:16 in the video)
Dr Miranda here teaches you one of the most basic and useful words in the language. It’s the adjective tloosh “good”.
In fact, he gives an example sentence where it gets used in 2 additional common ways, (A) to mark a command & (B) as an adverb in a common idiom:
Tloosh maika tloosh-nanich.
good you(singular) good-watch
“You be careful!”
(A command to watch out well.)
Saying just Tloosh maika… (“it will be good (that) you…”) to start out a command is very Northern Dialect.
(Elsewhere, people are more likely to say either Tloosh-poos maika… (“it would be good-if you…”), or nothing at all, at the start of the sentence.)
He repeats the (B) tloosh part in this sentence, saying it 3 times, which is for your benefit: he wants you to listen carefully to how the word is pronounced.
Be sure you click the linked blue word above, and practice imitating Louis Miranda’s superb pronunciation! Another nice detail of how he speaks Jargon is his Salish Sea-area local accent in nanich, [‘nænιch]. (We can represent this pronunciation as “nan-itch” in English spellings.)
Dleit haiyoo wuht atlki chako! Lots more to come!
