Category Archive: Uncategorized

Secretary of the Navy gets an Indian name

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The ubiquitous Tillikums of Elttaes again! I might have known!

An insult to our great Chinuk Wawa!

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Interesting for a post-frontier glimpse at how Chinuk Wawa was viewed in Oregon in comparison with commercially powerful European languages…

LINGUISTIC ARCHAEOLOGY: TREATY LANGUAGE (POINT NO POINT), PART 5

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Today’s treaty Article language later got litigated in the momentous Boldt Decision of 1974. That’s how important questions of translation can be…

LINGUISTIC ARCHAEOLOGY: TREATY LANGUAGE (POINT NO POINT), PART 4

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Back-translating Pacific Northwest Indian treaties is a revealing exercise; here’s more, and stay tuned for when I get into the Native people’s comments on it…

LINGUISTIC ARCHAEOLOGY: TREATY LANGUAGE (POINT NO POINT), PART 3

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(Back to: Part 1; Part 2) “On the first day of the council, treaty provisions were translated from English to the Chinook Jargon for the 1,200 assembled natives.”

Linguistic archaeology: Treaty language (Point No Point), part 2

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More linguistic archaeology, reconstructing some Chinuk Wawa treaty language.

Linguistic archaeology: Treaty language (Point No Point), part 1

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My sense of style tells me to start this very long series (it will be that) on reconstructing the Chinook Jargon used in Pacific Northwest official contexts with the amazingly named…Point No Point!

Explaining “tahmanous”

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Saying “tah tah” to one etymology…

Father Le Jeune and the Indians

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A picturesque contemporary article about Father Le Jeune’s wildly popular Chinuk pipa (Chinook Writing):

Mamuk-chaku- (minus the hyphens) (part 3, sort of)

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In reference to the last two days’ investigation into the short-lived grammatical pattern that combined mamuk- and chaku-: