“Kyimta” and more, in a Northern Dialect text

Thanks to Professor Peter Bakker for an email in 2022 that got me thinking in a new way about a seldom-researched Chinook Jargon book…

This is the 1912 “St Marks Kloosh Yiem Kopa Nesika Saviour Jesus Christ“, published in London (UK) by the British and Foreign Bible Society. It’s attributed to the Protestant missionary Charles Montgomery Tate.

I’ve been known to voice skepticism of this book due its free use of words plucked straight out of literary British English (like shew-bread, wilderness, and asses) without bothering to translate them into understandable Chinuk Wawa, a street language.

It does occur to me, however, that this same book does preserve interesting traces of actual Northern Dialect usage.

Kyimta is one spelling Tate has of kimt’aa ‘behind; afterwards’. The “ky” is suggestive of the Salish Sea-area  subdialect’s pronunciation habits, as heard also from Dr Louis Miranda.

Also perhaps indicating that subdialect are the spellings klataway / klattaway (for tlatawa ‘go’), if we’re to take the ending “ay” as something like [æ]. There are lots of those “short a” sounds in Jargon along that part of the coast.

I notice Tate also uses the English-sourced conjunction “or“! We don’t find much other evidence of this elsewhere in the Northern Dialect, but perhaps this is a reflection of a few people’s speech. The Southern Dialect, on the other hand, has fully embraced or.

Tate often uses the classic Northern Dialect verb sell, obviously from English. This one is known throughout the province, wherever Chinuk Wawa has been spoken, and also in the variant selum.

I see Tate says mamook sew for ‘sewing’ something, and this has the ring of a genuine Northern Dialect usage of its time. Plenty of English words had recently entered the Jargon in BC, typically replacing older, vaguer expressions (such as mamook-k’ipwit, literally ‘make-needle’) with more precise ones.

“St Marks Kloosh Yiem” is one of the only Northern texts we have that makes use of the supposed 😁 Jargon word whim ‘fall’; I suspect it’s a “dictionary word” for Tate.

Likewise, his yiem ‘story; news’ seems to never turn up in any (other) genuine Northern Dialect texts.

𛰅𛱁‌𛰃𛱂 𛰙𛱁𛱆‌𛰅𛱁 𛰃𛱄𛰙‌𛰃𛱄𛰙?
qʰáta mayka tə́mtəm?
kata maika tumtum? 
Que penses-tu? 
What do you think?
And can you say it in Chinuk Wawa?