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?
At the National Centre for Truth & Reconciliation’s online archive of historical documents, I notice that a document relating to the Chinook Jargon newspaper Kamloops Wawa is misfiled.
Why did George Gibbs say that the Chinook Jargon word for ‘hazelnut; nuts generally’ is K’alapuyan?
In honour of the 15th anniversary of this website of mine today, let’s plan ahead!
In my opinion, the best of the English-speaker-oriented Chinook Jargon guides in the frontier era may well have been George Gibbs’s “A Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, or Trade Language of Oregon“.
My 2023 post about “Bridge River paper salmon” is about the Northern Dialect.
Good thing to use your Chinook Jargon knowledge on: Image credit: Parks Canada ANKATI KAMLUPS INDYUSTRIAL SKUL (1890-1978) Ayu tanas klaska chako iakwa kopa klunas 108 ilihi, kopa klunas 38 hlwima Sawash tilikom… Continue reading →
At least as early as his 1884 edition, John K Gill of Portland included in his Chinook Jargon dictionary an entry <lum-pe-chuck> ‘grog’.
The word that also means ‘to be broken’ comes in handy in our modern tech age…
Can you say HIRE A LINGUIST! in Chinook Jargon?
I’m making note of this frontier-era news article not only for its casual use of Chinook Jargon (which every reader understood), but also to show that “fish Indians” was very common terminology.
