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?
Well beyond the frontier era, locals in the still-remote northern Olympic Peninsula of Washington state were likely to understood Chinook Jargon…
Professor Franz Boas, long may his name be remembered with respect, was not perfect.
The excellent observer, James G. Swan, syndicated his descriptions of life in Washington Territory nationwide.
Calling all Salish scholars; what do you think?
I think it’s typical of my home region, far eastern Washington, that folks weren’t quite as good at Chinook Jargon as those elsewhere.
Here’s a nice, serendipitous find that confirms some conclusions we’d already reached using the available evidence.
I try to scour the world for every scholarly mention of Chinook Jargon…
This note is just to follow up on my previous piece, “1923: A re-discovered Kamloops Chinuk Wawa publication“.
There’s plenty more of value to examine in Prof. Franz Boas’s quite brief 1892 article on “The Chinook Jargon“…
Keeping score, I count 2 jokes within this late telling of our venerable PNW joke.
