Author Archive

Syntactic considerations in editing L-N St Onge’s handwritten dictionary

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A whole lot of the time, Louis-Napoléon St Onge gave Chinuk Wawa words translations as nouns in English, even when they aren’t nouns in the Jargon.

How to inflect an interjection!

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Not something you see every day in most languages…eh?

Not ‘slaves’ but ‘commoners’: Why a word stopped being used in Chinuk Wawa

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It’s because there stopped being a stratified society where this word was being used. Did it also have to do with Métis people?

Lempfrit’s legendary, long-lost legacy (Part 26A: the Credo continued)

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More excellent material for us to learn from.

And more about ‘people’ being fundamentally Indigenous

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On the point that I’ve made many times, that tilixam ‘people’ is fundamentally ‘Indigenous people’, here’s a beautiful and scary example: 

Suttles, “Musqueam Reference Grammar”, Part 2

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Naika wawa masi kopa Paisley pi Mokwst Alex, for reminding me of a great book by a great anthropological linguist!

Why < nits > for ‘grandmother’ in St Onge’s handwritten dictionary?

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L-N St Onge’s handwritten Chinook Jargon dictionary (Central Dialect) has the usual word for ‘grandmother’, < chich > / < chits >. 

“The Survey of Vancouver English”: Part 3, siwash

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An interesting report, “The Survey of Vancouver English“, is subtitled “A Sociolinguistic Study of Urban Canadian English”.

Central dialect: ‘expiration’ & ‘boundary’ in St Onge’s handwritten dictionary

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The absolutely great 2012 Chinuk Wawa dictionary from Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde taught me the noun ubút, meaning ‘end; goal’. 

BC: a Chinookan or Chinook Jargon word in Secwépemc?

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The First Voices Secwepemc site tells us about a word, (s)llekméw̓es, meaning ‘stick games / lahal‘, i.e. slahal in much of Chinook Jargon.