New Additions to the TW/Jeff's Jargon Web sites

[Mike Cleven]

At 01:09 PM 10/3/99 -0700, Jeffrey Kopp wrote:

>New dictionaries on the Tenas Wawa/Jeff's Jargon web sites this
>month, mostly gleaned from U Toronto/Canadiana.org.
>Victor Henry, "Esquisse d'une grammaire de la langue innok: étudiée
>dans le dialecte des Tchiglit du Mackenzie, d'après la grammaire et
>le vocabulaire Tchiglit du R.P. Petitot" [Paris? 1878?].

I'm not sure you want this here, Jeff, although it's probably interesting
for Inuvaluit/Inuktitut speakers.  "La langue innok" is "the Inuk
language", not a variant of "la langue Chinook".  I note that you included
a Thompson (Nlakapmx, wherever the apostrophe goes) source here, so maybe
this was intentional.  There would have been extremely few Inuit/Eskimo who
came into contact with the Jargon, mostly in the Yukon territory and Alaska
after the Gold Rush (if at all).

Someone pointed out to me, by the way, that the use of "mahsie" in the
Yukon I cited a while back could just as easily have been a direct loan
into local native languages from French, rather than an introduction via
the Jargon.  This could well be; except that other Jargon words, notably
skookum and hyas and kloosh, figure prominently in the argot of the
Klondikers and their successors......I don't think there was much
missionary activity in the Yukon prior to the Gold Rush; the territory
being even more sparsely populated (by whites) then than now (max. 45,000
incl 25,000 Whitehorse in an area I think is larger than Texas).

I have a bookmark archive of Inuit-related sites, by the way, if anyone
would like me to send that chunk of my bookmarks to them; copy and pasting
will just show up as http:// URLs, so you'd have to explore.  There were a
couple of language sites, however, including some primers - although not as
lovingly crafted as the many Hawaiian, Cherokee, Lakota, Mohawk and other
language education sites on the Web.  But if anyone wants the Inuit URLs,
I'd be glad to forward them.

Mike