Category Archive: Uncategorized

Tl’ap- ‘wind up doing, manage to do’ is old in CW

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Many or most occurrences of t’łáp ‘to catch, to get, to receive’ in Chinuk Wawa clearly indicate someone intending — and working hard — to get hold of a physical object.

kíkwəli pi Sproat

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Gilbert Malcolm Sproat’s 1868 book “Scenes and Studies…” implies a unique etymology for a common Chinuk Wawa word…

1893-1897: Sweet “BetseyAnnSpikes” :) (Part 1 of 7)

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American newspapers in the late 1800s loved to publish letters from people living at the fringes of their circulation area, as a way of getting news for free.

“Why the alahs are sticky”

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Thanks again to my reader Jim Mattila, this time for sending along a scan of a neat old newspaper article involving Lushootseed speakers and Chinuk Wawa.

Some arguments about CW never go away!

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You’ve previously seen a 1910 letter to the editor of a Medford (OR) newspaper about this…

Mamuk-rop vs. mamuk-k’aw: a matter of life and death

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You’d be forgiven (ego te absolvo) for expecting that < mamuk k’aw > (literally ‘make tied’) and < mamuk rop > (literally ‘make rope(d)’) are synonyms…

“Artist talk and conversation with Sky Hopinka” 11.04.2020

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“Artist talk and conversation with Sky Hopinka“…

Complicating the story of íxsti, y’all

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A southern-dialect Chinuk Wawa form that we only know from Grand Ronde is íxsti ‘once’…

BC CW speaker is finalist for new Canadian banknote design

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Won Cumyow, the British Columbian court interpreter fluent in Chinook Wawa, may wind up being the face of Canada’s new $5 bill.

Now you can “know how” kəmtəks- ‘Habitually’ became a prefix early in CW

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I’ve been realizing that there were a number of grammatical categories that the non-Native documentors of early-creolized Chinuk Wawa didn’t see the significance of…