"Tanasvale" in Portland, Oregon

[Dave Robertson]

LhaXayEm,

While attending to a grave family matter last week in Vancouver, Washington,
I happened to glance at a newspaper advertisement that made the Chinook
Jargon part of my brain go into action.

The ad was for a place I remember as being named "Tanasvale", a shopping
mall or some other commercial venture in the Portland, Oregon area.

Does any of you have information about this name?  If it is consciously
based on a Chinook Jargon word (tEnEs, "little"), then there are a couple of
interesting points to be made.

First, hardly any new names using Chinook Jargon are invented these days in
the Northwest, it seems to me.  A pretty fair number of extant CJ-based
names get reused; you know, "skookum" this and "tillicum" that.  (On my
drive back from the Portland area, I was amazed to see a "Tillicum Motel"
in Umatilla, Oregon!)  But I see extremely little active creative use of CJ
by anyone since the last generation of Northwesterners that had any kind of
active acquaintance with the language--people who were born as late as say
the 1930's--Grand Ronde people and such excepted.  At any rate, "Tanasvale"
might be taken as a sign of an unusual degree of acquaintance with CJ.

Second, and corollary to the first point, "tanas" is and I think has always
been a relatively rare Chinook Jargon word for folks to borrow in naming a
business, a place, etc.  For every "tanas" you find on signboards in the
Northwest these days, you'll see twenty "skookums".  And there were plenty
of "camas" and "lacamas" names where I was in the east part of Vancouver.

Dave