ZOMBIE WORDS! 🎃 What do “emeets”, “emeek”, “capala” etc. have in common?

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Well, they’re either prime cuts of meat, or murder victims! Happy Halloween 🙂

{That’s a link to my past Hallowe’en-related posts here!}

Image credit: Key & Peele & Yarn

John K Gill of Portland, Oregon entrepreneurially padded the Chinook Jargon dictionary he published with some printing-room sweepings.

Gill took various previous folks’ information on Chinuk Wawa & blended it all together, indiscriminately.

He created a Frankenstein’s monster:

A vocabulary that no actual speakers of the Jargon ever used, let alone understood.

That’s my user warning to you.

If you don’t already speak Chinuk Wawa, love a duck, don’t just whip out some random dictionary & start stitching together some organs from this living, breathing language.

When folks disrespectfully do such things with a language they don’t know, they can wind up with atrocious official names for major housing projects.

The ingredient that I want to focus on for this moment is the excellent early-CW info from the fine observer, Alexander Ross of early Fort Astoria times.

Ross’s book, “Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River” (funny, he uses “settlers” in a different meaning from everyone else) has a great vocabulary list in it.

Cf. Ross 1849:342ff.

There are a number of Ross’s longer Lower Chinookan-etymology words that later got artificially gutted by the deletion of their last several letters.

(!!)

That’s another thing you don’t get to do to someone’s language, for Pete’s sakes.

Just off the top of my head, so to speak, I spot these body-part words:

  • page 343 ‘cheeks’ < capala-ketanux > (Gill 1909 < căp’-a-la >)
  • & ‘nose’ < emeeats > (Gill: < e-meets´ >)
  • page 344 ‘breasts’ < emets-aughtick > (Gill: < e-mī´h >)
  • & ‘back’ < emeck-kuts-ach > (Gill: < e-meek >)

Some of the Ross items above were already misprints, so they contain minor mistakes. For instance, ‘nose’ was almost certainly < emecats > in his handwritten master draft, but was mis-read by the printers.

Every Gill item in this list is a work of horror fiction to make Mary Shelley proud. His ‘nose’ is the least of them; the other 3 above are not possible words with any amount of conjuring.

If you use these words, you’re perpetuating their zombie existence.

You’re keeping them undead.

Only you can prevent this apocalypse!

Use reputable dictionaries (Grand Ronde is your friend). And…

HIRE A LINGUIST!
𛰅𛱁‌𛰃𛱂 𛰙𛱁𛱆‌𛰅𛱁 𛰃𛱄𛰙‌𛰃𛱄𛰙? qʰáta mayka tə́mtəm?
kata maika tumtum? Qu’en penses-tu?
What do you think?
And can you say it in Chinuk Wawa?

Hey! Teach Yourself northern-dialect Chinook Jargon!

And join free Zoom sessions…

Contact me for the Zoom link.

Category : Chinook Jargon, Chinuk Wawa