Pus msaika tiki kanawi ikta sil pi kot; If you folks want any kind of fabric or clothing,  shush pi siapul, kopa man pi kopa kluchmin. shoes or hats,for men or women. Pus… Continue reading →

Salish lexically-suffixed (classifier) numeral influence on the 1902 Chinook Jargon of a Sechelt person? Never mind my big words.  Just look:   Pi iht man iht man klatwa mamuk pu mawich. (and one… Continue reading →

Another great ad in Chinook Jargon: <THE KAMLOOPS SAWMILL, <All kinds of Dressed and Rough Lumber, Sash, Singles, Etc.>           T Kamlups so mil: The Kamloops Sawmill:      Iawa msaika… Continue reading →

Learn this: The word for ‘people’, tilixam in Chinuk Wawa (tilikom as spelled in Kamloops Wawa dialect), fundamentally means ‘Indigenous people’. I’ve pointed this out any number of times.  Back in the day, you had to… Continue reading →

In this old newspaper article about “Stone Implements Used by the Oregon Indians”, I discovered a previously unknown oral text in Chinuk Wawa.  (By that, I mean specifically lower Columbia River-area Chinook Jargon.)… Continue reading →

A nice news piece, which may clarify history as locally understood from English-language records: [left column:]      Iaka ukuk Kamlups chi styuil haws[.]      This is Kamloops’s new church. Kopa Oktobir… Continue reading →

TFW U save a URL to a cool linguistic thing & they take down the page In this source I recently found an early Chinook Jargon loan into the Indigenous language Hul’qumi’num (Cowichan /… Continue reading →

A single wry word of Chinook Jargon that says a lot. Since the sad shooting accident up the South Fork of the Elk River all the Kootenay Indians left.  They say there are… Continue reading →

Here’s an Oregon Country frontier-fiction piece from post-frontier Seattle, a time and place that allowed an author to use extensive Chinook Jargon. I like that. I also like how the character Muriel at… Continue reading →

A quirky by-product of operating a Chinook Jargon newspaper supported mostly by English-speaking merchants: Advertisements in English-language Chinuk pipa shorthand. Check it out, nasal vowels and all! Can you imagine yourself writing English phonetically?  I’ve… Continue reading →