Working my way through the Chinook Book of Devotions (1902) from British Columbia, I notice several ways of expressing ‘can; able’.

If you’ve looked at a lot of Chinook Jargon vocabularies, you’ve seen the early CW < tilikum-mama > ‘father’…

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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“…

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