Circa 1836-1838, OR/WA: John Kirk Townsend’s early CJ vocabulary, and coexisting pidgin + creole (Part 1)
I’ll be double-dog-darned!
As much thought as I’ve put into John Kirk Townsend, the justly respected naturalist of 2 centuries ago who had a Chinook Jargon name kə́ləkələ-tàyi, I guess I’ve never written about early Chinuk Wawa as he himself documented it.
“Vocabularly [SIC] of the Chinook language —
Near the mouth of the Columbia.
This is the trading language of the Columbia River — forms the communication of ten or twelv[e]
different tribes with the white traders residing in that Country.”
Henry Zenk (2015) quotes a different descriptor by Townsend, which I haven’t seen:
“Vocabulary of the language spoken by the Indians in the Columbia & used as the means of communication between them & the Whites. The language used is much mixed; being composed of Chenook, English, French &c.”
Let’s make a start on remedying this.
First off, the closest thing to a published discussion of these materials is our friend Henry Zenk’s fine 2015 ICSNL conference paper “New light on pidgin Chinookan: with due credit to Horatio Hale’s ‘esteemed friend’ J.K. Townsend“. It’s a PDF at that link, free for you to read & download.
I saw Henry and our other friend George Lang (author of the book “Making Wawa“) do a related presentation at the SPCL conference back in 2012, which the 2015 paper builds on.
Henry in 2015 beats everyone to the punch, in observing,
In contrast to Hale’s and later records, the Townsend
word-lists show few C[hinuk W[awa] words of ultimate Nootkan, English, or French origin,
instead consisting mostly of locally contributed (primarily Chinookan) words
and phrases. A number of the CW and Chinookan phrases provide interesting
case-studies in Chinookan morphological simplification: the word-forms are
Chinookan, but they are missing supposedly obligatory Chinookan inflections.
Townsend’s lists may point to a CW variety much closer to Chinookan than the
CW described by Hale, a finding which has implications for assessing the role of
Chinookan speakers in co-creating the hybrid CW of Hale and later authorities.
To that, I only add that we can think not just of ‘Chinookans’ but of “the role of ‘Chinook’ speakers”, i.e. of Indigenous bilingual Lower Chinookan-Lower Chehalis users.
Some chunk of my career as a linguist is based on the insight (which I attribute to conversations with Henry Zenk and Tony Johnson) that even before contact with Euro-Americans, the villages that eventually gave birth to Chinuk Wawa spoke both of those languages, so both became fairly equal parents of CW. This suggests a pretty unusual situation; pidgin languages are typically understood to have only a single primary source language.
Beyond suggesting this small revision in our thinking, I also want to point out that:
Townsend documented a more pidgin style of Chinook Jargon that was spoken by and with tribal people, at almost the exact same time as Demers & Blanchet recorded a variety displaying a more regular structure which I take as the early-creolized style of the Métis, Fort Vancouver-centred, fur-trade community.
I believe that by identifying the coexistence of distinct pidgin vs. creole CJ in the 1830s, we can have a greater understanding of why there’s much more Lower Chinookan in Townsend’s list, and so much more French in Demers & Blanchet and subsequent sources such as Hale, Gibbs, and so forth.
Now, let’s make John Kirk Townsend‘s Chinook Jargon vocabulary notes easy for the public to find. (That’s a link, too, so you can go view his entire document at the venerable American Philosophical Society.)
Now to the words themselves…
Part 1
- god kannum
[ < Lower Chinookan; cf. modern CW ikʰánəm ‘story’]
- devil skookum spirit, ditto, hell, ditto
[ < Lower Chehalis Salish; cf. múodern CW skukúm ‘a “Dangerous Thing” ‘] - heaven kooseh (the sky)
[ < Lower Chinookan; cf. modern CW kúsax̣ ‘sky’]
- hell skookum illá-he* (devil’s land)
[ 2nd word is < Lower Chinookan; cf. modern CW íliʔi ~ ílihi ‘place’;
JKT’s compound phrase is new to us] - sun o-tlagh
[ < Lower Chinookan]
- moon ook-tlemen
[ < Lower Chinookan]
- stars k’gh-‘kagh-nap
[ < Lower Chinookan]
- fire ool-a-pits-keh*
[ < Lower Chinookan]
- air k’m-ma-háts
[ < Lower Chinookan]
- earth illáhee
[see note above at ‘hell’]
- water tsuk’
[ < Lower Chinookan / Nuuchahnulth; cf. modern CW tsə́qw] - wood kom-mon-ok
[ < Lower Chinookan; cf. CW ták’umunaq ‘100’!]
- stone kinnaks
[ < Lower Chinookan]
- bone eō-tso
[ < Lower Chinookan] - house t’quah-le
[ < Lower Chinookan] - bread shappleel
[ < some middle Columbia River language]; cf. modern CW sáplél]
- deer mowitch
[ < Nuuchahnulth; cf. modern CW máwich]
- elk molak
[ < Lower Chinookan; cf. modern CW múlak] - salmon qua-nagh
[ < Lower Chinookan] - bird kallak-alla
[ < Lower Chinookan; cf. modern CW kə́ləkələ] - horse kew’-
a-tan*
[ < Lower Chinookan and maybe earlier to Spanish; cf. modern CW kʰíyutən] - dog kăh-mooks
[ < Lower Chinookan and probably Lower Chehalis Salish; cf. modern CW kʰámuksh] - boat kan-ním
[ < Lower Chinookan; cf. modern CW kəním, meaning primarily ‘canoe’] - cow moos-moos
[ < Métis fur workers’ speech, ultimately from Plains Cree; cf. modern CW músmus] - man skot-la-le-cum
[ < Lower Chinookan; same root as tillecum in the next entry]
- people tillecum
[ < Lower Chinookan; cf. Modern CW tílixam] - woman agh-keel
[ < Lower Chinookan] - child at’l’-kas-kas
[ < Lower Chinookan] - my father tl’-cum-mama
[ < Lower Chinookan]
