Chinook Today

[Mike Cleven]

> Joe Rickey wrote:
>
> Klahowya!
>          I found your site very informative and interesting and your
> philosophy on developing Chinook for modern day use exciting.  For
> many years I have been part of a people (buckskinners & trappers) that
> have slowly sought the development of subculture that believes in the
> value of adaptation of many native ways, values, and beliefs into our
> everyday lives. Many of us have adapted chinook as it was developed
> somewhat through a mutual effort of native and non-native peoples
> thereby reflecting the feelings of our forebearers of the fur trade.
> We have changed things somewhat( like dropping le and la from french
> loan words and combining separate words.I think the accent has been
> somewhat different in some areas because of spanish influence.  I know
> I have had to learn to repronounce some words learned from my father
> in order to use them as they sound in the north. I hope to see a
> chinook chatroom on msn in the future and may just schedule some when
> enough people can schedule the same time slot.
> Well I don't mean to ramble on but did want to let you know we are out
> there. Please drop me an Email when you have time.
>                                        Hyas Ple - Piegeena
> Piegeena at hotmail.com

Klahowya!  You're comments have made me curious as to your community's
population and how many of you are active in trying to use/rejuvenate
Chinook.  It's not just idle curiosity; there's been some discussion
about revising the "official" number of Chinook speakers as found in the
major online linguistic resources, even including those for whom it is a
second language (as for nearly all of us in our listserves) but also
looking for some kind of census of surviving speakers, no matter how
widely scattered and how many years in disuse.  Any idea of the actual
geographic range of the Jargon's usage in your region historically, and
how far you are spread now?

Of course we'd all be very interested to see any wordlist you could
provide, especially of peculiarities; the Spanish influence sounds very
interesting and you probably have ideoms and phrases that may have
different or new meanings.

One earnest caution - if you were concerned enough about being
understood by us up north as to learn to repronounce father-learned
words (hyas ikta okook) then you may wish to reconsider the dropping of
the French-form "la/le" - unless that's something already
well-entrenched within your dialect, of course.  It's just that it may
engender confusion with northern speakers, including Grand Ronders who
are closer to you than the rest of us; a lot of the remaining roots are
still French, after all - caset, plet, medsin, etc. so you're really not
unfrenchifying much.  For a lot of words it won't matter because of
similarities to English loans; laboat/boat, lamedsin/medsin, etc.  On
the other hand your "Montay" sounds much more Spanish, happily, and it
suits the Jargon.  Can you give us a list of examples of dropping the
'la/le'?  Any other terms for horseflesh, perhaps, or animals than
what's on my http://members.home.net/skookum/critters.html page?

Mike Cleven
http://members.home.net/cayoosh/
http://members.home.net/skookum/