A report of a letter in Chinese Pidgin English…can it be found in some archive?

Untranslated Chinuk Wawa in an Alaska newspaper, frontier-era.

Mighty patronizing, but I think revenge gets had, and there’s some good data here.

Tlus pus msaika yutl tomtom! (Rejoice!) Chi tanas wawa chako kopa nsaika! (A new word has come to us!)

Lively colloquial use of a language is gold.  Too many now-endangered or extinct languages lack clues to how they were once spontaneously spoken. I want to suggest that, of all the unexpected genres,… Continue reading →