Experience introducing college students to phonetic notation as an alternate way to represent their mother tongue suggests you will have a hard time reading this, at first. Want to leave your transcription of… Continue reading
I blogged a Chinook Jargon hymn translation by Rev. C. M. Tate the other day; there are 2 more at the Newberry Library. If you order a copy before I get to this,… Continue reading
Last post, I introduced you to California Pidgin Spanish of the gold-rush times, 1858…now, here is más. This time without Chinook Jargon mixed in. First I want to report that the earliest find I’ve… Continue reading
Believe it or not, pidgin languages — like Chinook Jargon — quite frequently interact with each other. Cultural contact situations have, historically, often been cyclone-like: traveling swirls of activity moving from one locale onward to… Continue reading
Being a scotty boffin o’ contact linguistics, I say let’s go crazy with Chinuk Wawa! We have at least 3 simplex words for “insane” in the Jargon, another instance of embarrassing riches where… Continue reading
“Units of measure, charismatic megafauna, & bridging from Chinook to English in 1890s Kamloops” How’s that for a dissertation title? 🙂 Because, in the course of a small excerpt from Kamloops Wawa #100 (15 October… Continue reading
…and here’s a real example in the Jargon of an Aboriginal fella. Joseph Thompson, probably recently surnamed thus for his Salish tribal affiliation, contributed a letter to issue #94 (03 September 1893) of Kamloops Wawa,… Continue reading
I talked yesterday about a word for “sailor”, shipman, that most likely jumped ship from the S.S. Chinook Jargon and took up residence in Hul’q’umi’num’ Salish of southwestern Vancouver Island, Canada — so today let’s pursue the… Continue reading
James “Jim” A. Wood‘s letter in Chinook Jargon to Professor Edmond Meany, June 25, 1907, regarding the upcoming (1909) Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Typically for the West, we were in a rush: the expo was planned… Continue reading
So I take it: <hwshupmenqun> in Hul’q’umi’num’ of Vancouver Island, BC is said to mean “speak broken English”. In Americanist notation, that’d be xʷšəpménqən. It’s thought to be “probably from ‘shipman’ “. (With… Continue reading
