I know I’m not alone in having doubted the presence of some “Indian” (sorry) words in Chinuk Wawa that we know originated from far-away Eastern Algonquian languages, and that we know could only… Continue reading →

Under naika ‘I; mine’ in Louis-Napoléon St Onge’s handwritten Chinuk Wawa dictionary that’s about 150 years old, there comes a string of Central Dialect entries that express what I’ll call non-core kin. (No offense to… Continue reading →

Naika wawa masi kopa Paisley pi Mokwst Alex, for reminding me of a great book by a great anthropological linguist!

I found this gem in an issue of the Kamloops Phonographer “introductory number” (June 1892), page 2:

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: