A sort of speculative piece for you today… (Image credit: TodayIFoundOut.com) tsiĥ-tomtom ‘shrewd’ is in Father St Onge’s Chinuk Wawa dictionary manuscript of 1892. That’s literally ‘sharp-heart’. In modern Grand Ronde tribal spelling… Continue reading
…trying to use Chinook Jargon in Alaska in July of 1902! (Image credit: Wikipedia) “Reminiscences of a War-Time Statesman and Diplomat” is a family memoir by Frederick William Seward (New York: G.P. Putnam’s… Continue reading
Until & after my dictionaries (plural) of Chinuk Wawa are published, I want every last one of you to buy the Grand Ronde Tribes’ dictionary. At $29.95 it’s a very good deal, giving… Continue reading
Thus quoth the Raven: Ilo kah son wiht. (Image credit: FurAffinity.net) Disclaimer: It’s not totally intentional that I keep writing things you can relate to Hallowe’en. But this is America, and I know… Continue reading
Edited 10/16/2017 to add: Coincidentally in the local Salish languages mús means both ‘four’ and ‘eyes’! Could that have influenced the Jargon expression by making it humorous? (If puns are funny.) Did local people joke… Continue reading
In a previous installment, we learned from Civil War general Phil Sheridan that wood rats know Chinook Jargon. (Image credit: Story of the Chinook) Today, a supernatural being in Alaska joins the conversation.… Continue reading
When I was researching in southeast Alaska, local museum folks referred to “skookum boards“ to mean the plaques sometimes found on the fronts of Native bighouses in Alaskan Tlingit territory soon after the… Continue reading
My critical arguments about the origin of Chinook Jargon’s Boston man / bástən mán for ‘American/white people’ have gotten rehashed lately. The long-accepted story has been that this expression has to do with the early… Continue reading
Western gold rushes were associated with Chinook Jargon. We see bits of CJ appearing in northern California shortly after the Forty-Niners arrived from the eastern states. Those men couldn’t have known a useful… Continue reading
Some weekend reading: “The Passing of a Race: And More Tales of Western Life” by David Williams Higgins (1834-1917), formerly speaker of the British Columbia Legislature, published in 1905 by William Briggs, Toronto.… Continue reading
