Gibbs's Alphabetical vocabulary of the Chinook language

[Francisc Czobor]

Klahowya konaway six!
 
Did you notice that George Gibbs’s “Alphabetical vocabulary of the Chinook language” is freely available on-line now?
 
The address is:
http://www.secstate.wa.gov/history/publications_detail.aspx?p=65
 
Although the graphy used is far from the modern phonetic orthography, and, as the author mentions, it contains words from different dialects (Chinook proper, Clatsop, probably also Wakiakum) and was published in an unrevised form, for someone for me it is nevertheless useful, to find etymologies for Jargon words.
So, for instance, now I know that iLEGwa “mud turtle” (Jacobs’s “Texts in Chinook Jargon”) / ethlagwo “turtle” (“Eula dictionary”) comes from the Chinook word rendered by Gibbs as it-lá-hwa, et-lak-hwa “tortoise” [sincerely speaking, because the word was recorded by John Hudson and his daughter Eula Petite, I suspected first that it might be Kalapuyan; but then I realized that people, even multilingual, don’t mix up the several languages they know so readily…].
It is true that in this vocabulary Gibbs gives as Chinook words that in his Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon appear of Chehalis origin (like for instance sitshum “swim” or tlukutlh “broad”), but this might be due to the increasing influence of the Chehalis who, if I remember correctly, assimilated linguistically the last speakers of Lower Chinook.
 
Francisc


      

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