Oral history of early Chinook Jargon use for lying to enemies of the Haíɬzaqv
I’ve heard certain people express the folksy idea that Chinuk Wawa, is a language you can only tell lies in. Well now, where did that ever come from?
Turns out, there’s a story remembered in Haíɬzaqv (“Heiltsuk”) communities of coastal BC that names names of those who mis-used Chinook Jargon this way!
It must have happened later than 1855, because that was when the Jargon had an explosion of use in British Columbia. In reality, it was probably years later, because it took a while for the language to percolate up away from the southern interior gold regions…
This is in Franz Boas’s 1928 Columbia University publication, “Bella Bella Texts“, i.e. ones told in Haíɬzaqvḷa. On pages 132 and 133 is Willy Gladstone’s narrative titled “War with the ᵋwī′k!ēnoxᵘ“ (that’s the Oweekeno people, who have a Northern Wakashan language closely related to Heiltsuk/Bella Bella).
I’ll show you the English translation first, to give you the setup:
Then arose/ the one whose name was G·a′g·îlġᴇma-
las. It is said he was attendant (of the chief) Made-Crazy.
Then he talked/ and pointing around with his first finger he
said: “All are nearly dead!”[1] / Thus he said speaking Chinook.
Several of the ᵋwī′k!ēnoxᵘ inquired for his/ meaning. “What do
you mean, G·a′g·îlġᴇmalas?” (20) thus he was told. “You will
have plenty to eat. Take empty boxes aboard to put the rest of
the feast into them. You will have plenty to eat,/ is what I
said.”
[Footnote 1:]
He spoke Chinook jargon which at that time was understood by
the Bella Bella but not by the Rivers Inlet people.
So, with the fancy new language Chinuk Wawa, the Haíɬzaqv ambassador / inviter was pretending to invite the Oweekenos to a potlatch, but his tribe really planned to murder the guests.
Now that you have that in your mind, let me show you what he said in Jargon:
“wēk saia kanauwe memalus”
= weik-saiyaa kanawei mimaloos
= wík-sáyá kʰánawi míməlus(t)
I’ll dwell on that phrase for a sec. In the Northern Dialect, which is the kind of Chinook Jargon that’s spoken in BC, weik-saiyaa doesn’t always mean ‘nearly’, as Boas’s English translation puts it. Instead, it frequently has what’s in this setting a more menacing usage, as ‘soon’. And, coming before the rest of the sentence, this time-adverb meaning is the most likely one.
That is, the intended meaning that I think was present was ‘Pretty soon y’all will be dead.’
(If ‘all are nearly dead’ had been intended, I’d expect the sentence to have a different word order: weik-saiyaa mimaloos, kanawei / kanawei weik-saiyaa mimaloos.)
This isn’t the first time we’ve corrected Papa Franz’s Jargon knowledge, all respect to him…
Bonus fact:
Here’s how you talk about talking Chinook Jargon, in Haíɬzaqvḷa:
In Boas’s now-outdated phonetics, that’s ts!înu′k!wāla.
Bonus bonus fact:
In the English translation that I showed above, we see the phrasing, “Thus he said”, meaning “that’s what he said”.
This was in the Heiltsuk language, but it’s put the same way we find Chinook Jargon speakers putting things, for example in the 2012 Grand Ronde dictionary: kakwa ya kəmtəks = “it’s what he knows”, from elder speaker Wilson Bobb.
Indigenous areally shared feature!
hayu masi for this 🙂