Do you realize how awesome it is to find specimens of sustained discourse in Chinuk Wawa as early as the 1870s?

Here’s a tidy little slice of “how to discuss the world around us in Jargon”.

I suggest we could add the translation ‘arrest someone’ to the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary entry for k’áw-k’aw.

Just to add to the confusing mix of theories about where the name “Oregon” came from…

More lovely stuff, new to science at the time, from Prof. Franz Boas’s brief 1892 article on “The Chinook Jargon“…

With thanks to Jeffrey Kopp for making me aware of this sad event.

Tuck this into our file on telegrams in Chinook Jargon.

In the post-frontier era, you see, anything written in Chinuk Wawa caught the eye as an oddity.

The sender wrote an explanatory message on this one, involving Chinook Jargon…

“hihi-pʰikcha” by Tyla LaGoy, on page 13 of Lane Community College’s magazine “Chinuk Wawa” #2, has the expression qʰa-ikta (literally ‘where-thing’), ‘whatever’…