Announced in the Seattle Star newspaper on April 14, 1920, Mabel Cleland’s “Star Seattle Story Book” was a Chinook Jargon treat, free for the asking. It seems to have run as a serial for a… Continue reading
Found: a Chinuk Wawa song we didn’t know of before.
I’ve got two things on my nose, er, mind.
We’ve been looking at pioneer Laura Belle Downey Bartlett’s writing in Chinook Jargon, in contrast to her well-known song lyrics.
There are a number of really useful resources for studying Chinook Jargon, a.k.a. Chinuk Wawa. I will be annotating each entry with more information.–DDR These are available for free, online: David D. Robertson’s… Continue reading
Unusually for Laura Belle Downey-Bartlett’s collected Chinook Jargon songs, this one’s an original, not a translation of a hit.
IMHO: this one is right up there with the greatest productions of Google Translate, or of any nonsense verse writer.
On page xv of Robert Emmett Hawley’s book “Skqee Mus, or Pioneer Days on the Nooksack” (Bellingham, WA, 1945) is the following letter to the reader.
Being a longtime partisan of Chinook Jargon, it pains me to confess that the Chinooking of today’s song made it much worse than the touching original!
Laura Belle Downey-Bartlett was a pioneer girl on Puget Sound who went on to create a major portion of the known artistic material in Chinook Jargon.
