CHINOOK JARGON AS A BC ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE: The following is an argument I wrote up as a grad student, a few years back. It’s keenly relevant now, eh?
Here’s another fascinatingly flawed song translation by Laura Belle Downey-Bartlett.
A whole lot of the time, Louis-Napoléon St Onge gave Chinuk Wawa words translations as nouns in English, even when they aren’t nouns in the Jargon.
Not something you see every day in most languages…eh?
It’s because there stopped being a stratified society where this word was being used. Did it also have to do with Métis people?
More excellent material for us to learn from.
On the point that I’ve made many times, that tilixam ‘people’ is fundamentally ‘Indigenous people’, here’s a beautiful and scary example:
Naika wawa masi kopa Paisley pi Mokwst Alex, for reminding me of a great book by a great anthropological linguist!
L-N St Onge’s handwritten Chinook Jargon dictionary (Central Dialect) has the usual word for ‘grandmother’, < chich > / < chits >.
An interesting report, “The Survey of Vancouver English“, is subtitled “A Sociolinguistic Study of Urban Canadian English”.
The absolutely great 2012 Chinuk Wawa dictionary from Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde taught me the noun ubút, meaning ‘end; goal’.
