Category Archive: Uncategorized

Another reason why chaku- verbs aren’t passive

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In my research on Chinuk Wawa, I admit it took years to come to see verbs prefixed with chaku- (literally ‘come’) as Inceptive Aspect.

“Cultus kopa nika” is a northern CW expression

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A pretty famous expression in Chinook Jargon is ‘I don’t care’, commonly spelled < cultus kopa nika > in the old, English-speaker-oriented publications.

Competing etymologies for láwtish

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A word recorded in Grand Ronde’s creolized southern-dialect Chinuk Wawa, and nowhere else, is láwtish ‘a bickerer, argumentative person’.

At last, an explanation for the idiom mə́kʰmək ‘resent, envy’?

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This will be just a quick morsel.

Heard in the wild: “chucks”

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UBC forestry professor Suzanne Simard, author of the book “Finding the Mother Tree”, dropped some Chinuk Wawa into her interview with Dave Davies on NPR’s “Fresh Air” program this week.

1888: A sermon by Myron Eells (part 4)

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We’re up to page 35 of Horatio Hale’s book “An International Idiom” today…

Another Indigenous metaphor: ‘Afternoon’ in CW is from Chinookan

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Chinuk Wawa’s southern dialect, as documented in the Grand Ronde Indian Reservation community, says láx̣w-sán (literally ~ ‘leaning-sun’) for ‘afternoon’.

Hunting in the south, hunting in the north

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One of the many ways that the southern and northern dialects of Chinuk Wawa differ is in how they talk about hunting.

‘Good enough’ for linguistics work :)

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Another Chinuk Wawa structure that I propose comes from (Lower) Chinookan languages…

wík-íkta mákuk as a clue…a time capsule, even

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Chinuk Wawa’s terminology for value in trade has puzzled me for a long time…