A Haida mocking song in Chinook Jargon. From Rolf Knight, “Indians at Work: An Informal History of Native Labour in British Columbia 1858-1930“. An aside about Haida fishermen and cannery workers who journeyed… Continue reading
Believe it or not, pidgin languages — like Chinook Jargon — quite frequently interact with each other. Cultural contact situations have, historically, often been cyclone-like: traveling swirls of activity moving from one locale onward to… Continue reading
Being a scotty boffin o’ contact linguistics, I say let’s go crazy with Chinuk Wawa! We have at least 3 simplex words for “insane” in the Jargon, another instance of embarrassing riches where… Continue reading
I’m blogging this for the name “Chinook saw”. This was a mystery we discussed 16 years ago on the CHINOOK listserv. The phrase “Chinook saw” turns up in the Thompson River Salish dictionary,… Continue reading
Tobacco‘s but an Indian weed, said a moralistic Elizabethan song: But it sure was popular. Chinook Jargon had many words for it… I want to add one to the documentation. You’ll never guess it. Will… Continue reading
Washington territory pioneer Thomas Wickham Prosch (1850-1915 and yes, a son of early [1857] North Oregon settler, Steilacoom newspaper editor, and official territorial publisher, Charles Prosch) published a Chinook Jargon dictionary in 1888 that I… Continue reading
“Units of measure, charismatic megafauna, & bridging from Chinook to English in 1890s Kamloops” How’s that for a dissertation title? 🙂 Because, in the course of a small excerpt from Kamloops Wawa #100 (15 October… Continue reading
Til mamuk: literally “heavy work”: an expressive idiom for violent mayhem. You’re only going to discover this one if you take the trouble to dig into Kamloops Chinook Jargon, shorthand alphabet and all. First of… Continue reading
One use of qʰáta, literally ‘how’, that’s always seemed to me an idiom characteristic of the Grand Ronde (Oregon) creole variety of Chinuk Wawa is as a predicative adjective (or stative verb, it… Continue reading
…and here’s a real example in the Jargon of an Aboriginal fella. Joseph Thompson, probably recently surnamed thus for his Salish tribal affiliation, contributed a letter to issue #94 (03 September 1893) of Kamloops Wawa,… Continue reading
