People whose Chinuk Wawa is fit onto English-language sentence frames, or drop lots of English into their Chinuk Wawa, shouldn’t be mistaken for “acrolectal” speakers. Let me demystify… Advertisements
From the author of the New York Times bestseller “The Jane Austen Book Club”, some high-class fictional Chinook Jargon.
The other day I mused about Chinuk Wawa dictionary writer WS “El Comancho” Phillips’s weird pronunciation-spelling of k’áynuɬ ‘tobacco’ as < chinoos >.
Or a comedy of eras?
One of the early and omnipresent grammatical formations in the Jargon seems Native in its inspiration, while it may reflect universal tendencies coming together also.
I have questions, dear readers.
You learn a lot when you think about who borrowed what…
I think at least one lexical suffix each in Lower & Upper Chehalis comes from Chinuk Wawa.
In Klallam Salish (north end of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, opposite Canada’s Vancouver Island), the word ɬčəx̣-mít means ‘nickel’.
One of those “I thought I’d already written about this” moments…
