It occurred to me to wonder this.

My previous comments about the uncertain gender of Victoria Howard’s monstrous antagonist in her tale “Just One His Leg, Just One His Arm” lead me to talk about sexual behavior.

There’s much more to be said about verbal “aspect” in Chinuk Wawa … here’s a bit …

The single important fact to stress is, we’ve known almost nothing about the late-1700s “Nootka Jargon”!

Today’s information source is “A narrative or journal of a voyage of discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and round the world: Performed in the years 1791, 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795″ credited… Continue reading →

kʰíyəp ‘darkness, dark’ is said in the 2012 Grand Ronde dictionary to be “of obscure origin”.

Father JMR Le Jeune of Kamloops brings us a Chinook Jargon letter that he received from the front lines of World War 1.

I’m very intrigued that in the southern creole CW-speaking community of Grand Ronde, Oregon — and only there — we find skúkum-háws as just one of several expressions for ‘jail’.

At this stage in Chinuk Wawa research, we often have a pretty clear idea of the first known historical occurrence of individual “words” of CW.

Throughout the known history of Chinuk Wawa, folks have written the main preposition as something like  < kopa >.