More tricky treats for your October: (Image credit: The Daily Coyote) A single strange word in somebody’s old field notebook doesn’t have to have much significance. Sometimes a mistake is a mistake is… Continue reading →

lisítaluy: (Photo credit: LewisTalk) It’s glossed as “squash” in the Quinault Salish dictionary I have. Every time I saw the word, I thought, That looks so weirdly intricate in Quinault. To be native,… Continue reading →

File this under Believe It Or Not! Perhaps THE most amazing case of synchronicity in our Chinook Jargon world: the, well, legendary Franz Boas (he founded the Department of Anthropology and indirectly the… Continue reading →

Not too long ago, I read the Forty-Niner A[lonzo] Delano’s 1854 book: “Life on the Plains and Among the Diggings; being Scenes and Adventures of an Overland Journey to California: with Particular Incidents… Continue reading →

This Chinuk Wawa word alím ‘to rest’ has been a puzzle. Grand Rounde’s dictionary plays with possible French or Lower Chinookan sources for it…    (Photo credit: Cheryl’s Trading Post) But now that I’m constantly… Continue reading →

I though you’d enjoy a couple of fun anecdotes from Clarence Bagley’s detailed, knowledgeable “History of Seattle” (published there by S.J. Clarke Publishing Company in 1916). (Image from Amazon.com.) The first has to… Continue reading →

Sometimes you just need a dose of old-time advertising in Chinuk Wawa… HORSES! CUITANS!! The subscriber begs leave to inform his numerous friends and the public generally, that he is always on hand,… Continue reading →

I have an idea building in my mind that Coast Salish provided an intercultural lingo, maybe before “contact” with the (drifted ashore/dead/floating houses/other hypotheses) white people…and definitely soon after. (Photo credit: SFU Museum.)… Continue reading →

Words for ‘bay’… In Chinuk Wawa you say luʔlu-tsəqw, ’round-water’. And you think, yes, that makes sense. (Images from Australia.com.) Salish speakers in the homeland of Chinuk Wawa agree with you. Quinault speakers say tál̓-maɬ-ču which… Continue reading →

Since I was talking about cats in Quinault yesterday… How is Coos kwīʹyos ʹdogʹ a Chinook Jargon word, as Leo Frachtenberg claims in “Coos Texts” (1913:205)? (Image from Carol’s Pet Sitting, Coos Bay,… Continue reading →