I think *lots of* English words came in at the earliest stages of Chinook Jargon
Eyeballing all recorded “Nootka Jargon” (pidginized Nuuchanulth of Vancouver Island, BC) and the earliest documented history of Chinook Jargon, I see an obvious difference…
Image credit: Giphy
Even though the core is Nuuchahnulth vocabulary, there are never any English words used up north, while down south in Chinook country, we find English in abundance right from the get-go.
Now, not all of the English words documented as being spoken by Lower Chinookans in early contact times remained in Chinuk Wawa (at least not in the polite published dictionaries) — so we no longer get to say “damned rascal”, “son of a bitch”, and so on. 😒
(However, in over 100 posts on this website, I maintain that CW has always been associated with cussin’.)
I’ve decided to start a list of common Chinook Jargon words from English that stand a high chance of having come in from contact with sailors and maritime traders from contact in 1792 through to when Métis/French Canadian speakers (and other foreigners) arrived in 1811 to found Fort Astoria.
Some of my criteria:
- We can imagine that things you could point at (nouns; observable actions) were the most likely broad category of likely words people would learn, thus nouns and ‘wash’, ‘smoke’…
- Plenty of words refer primarily to shipboard life: ‘sail’, ‘rum’, ‘haul’, ‘Pacific Islander’, and so on. They’re in the list.
- Lots of other words were certainly present onboard in the 19 years we’re talking about, and were sometimes prominent in dealings with Indigenous people: ‘paper’, ‘handkerchief’, ‘rope’…
- And the most visible features of European-descended seafarers’ culture: ‘Sunday’, ‘smoke’, ‘shame’…
- The earliest known popular trade items documented in Chinook country: old ‘muskets’ (and not other kinds of guns) from back East, ‘coats’, ‘molasses’…
- The old documents agree that Indigenous and foreign people were constantly making plans to meet again in some time span: ‘tomorrow’ / in so many ‘days’ or ‘months’ / in a ‘year’.
- In some instances, we should infer that a given English word was in use because a coordinate Indigenous term was present, e.g. from Nuuchahnulth there’s ɬuchmən ‘woman’, therefore it’s not crazy to think man was also being said.
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I’ll say something more, following this list.
- bastən ‘American’
- gitəp ‘get up’
- hal ‘pull’
- haws ‘house, building, room’
- həm ‘smell, smelly’
- hihi? (if thought of as originally English, then Chinookan) ‘laugh; fun’
- hikchəm ‘handkerchief’ (another reason this seems old to me in the language is the radical Indigenization of its sounds)
- kʰanakʰa ‘Pacific Islander’
- kʰaptən ‘captain’
- kʰilay ‘cry; yell’
- kʰinchuch ‘British’
- kitɬən ‘kettle’ (like ‘handkerchief’, this may be real old, as it has been massively Indigenized; have I ever written down my belief that it got folk-etymologized via Lower Chehalis as containing their Instrumental suffix -ɬʔ / -ɬən? Which in turn would suggest Indigenous folks imagined this was fundamentally a 1-syllable English word *ket / *kit!)
- kʰom? (if this wasn’t originally in reference to horses, later, at Fort Vancouver) ‘comb’
- kʰut ‘coat’, outer layer of clothing
- kʰul ‘cold’
- lam ‘rum’ was a trade item → ‘any alcohol’ (but not wayn ‘wine’ or wiski ‘wiski’, which I think came later)
- lays ‘rice’
- lup ‘rope’
- mama ‘mother’
- man ‘man’ & ul-man ‘old man’
- məlasis ‘molasses’
- məskit ‘musket’
- mun ‘moon; month’
- nim ‘name’
- nus ‘nose’
- o! ‘Oh!’
- papa ‘father’
- paya ‘fire; burn(t); cook(ed); ripe’
- pʰey? ‘pay’ (would this have come up in the barter environment that dominated early contact?)
- pipa ‘paper’
- pis ‘urine; urinate’
- pish ‘fish’
- pit ‘bed’
- pot ~ bot ‘boat’ as in things smaller than a ship
- p(‘)us ‘cat’
- salt ‘salt’
- samən ‘salmon’ was traded by Indigenous people
- san ‘sun; day’
- santi ‘Sunday’ → ‘a week’
- sik ‘sick; hurt(ing)’
- sil ‘(European-style) cloth’
- skin ‘skin; pelt; fur’
- smuk ‘smoke’
- sno ‘snow’ → ‘year’?
- sop ‘soap’
- spun ‘spoon’
- stachən ‘sturgeon’ was traded by Indigenous people
- stik ‘wood; mast; tree’
- stil? ‘steel’ (as in flint and steel, cf. flints were traded to Chinooks)
- ston ‘stone(s)’ (perhaps not yet including ‘testes’?)
- shat¹ ‘shirt’
- shat² ‘shot, lead’
- shim ‘shame(ful)’
- ship ‘ship’ as opposed to smaller ‘boats’
- shit ‘excrement; excrete’
- shuka ‘sugar’
- shus(h) ‘shoe(s)’
- tans ‘dance’
- tʰi ‘tea’
- tʰiktʰik? (if thought of as originally English, then Chinookan) ‘a watch’ (timepiece; these were sometimes traded to the Chinooks)
- tlay ‘dry’
- tumala ‘tomorrow’
- ul/ol ‘old’ & ul-man ‘old man’
- wach (verb) ‘to watch’, cf. shipboard watches = work shifts
- wam ‘warm; hot’
- wash ‘wash’
- wayhi ‘Hawai‘ian’
- win ‘wind; breath; life’
Even leaving out the words I’ve marked with “(?)”, this is still about 5 dozen lexemes. Sixty (60) words, ladies and gentlemen! During Chinuk Wawa’s better-recorded history as an Astorian & later language, English has consistently been found to account for about 20% of the vocabulary. In contrast, I’d wager that at this earlier contact stage, before there’s much sign of the local Chinookan and Chehalis words that entered the mix and came to dominate it, English may have provided ½ or more of the words mutually understood between the cultures.
{Note that it’s incredibly unlikely that we know all of the English words that were in early Chinook Jargon. Just think of how, even in the most fully documented stages of CJ, tons of English-sourced vocabulary was left out of dictionaries because its meaning would be obvious to the readers.}
Another point: following my inductive guidelines above, which are drawn from reading the early contact narratives, I find a not-necessarily-intuitive result: My list of English words is almost all monosyllables; they are ⅔ or more of the entries. Maybe these are among the easiest bits for a non-Anglophone to pick up on the fly…but also, they’re quite frequent in spoken English, although I haven’t chased down solidly researched figures on this.
