"Ankuttie" Chinook,a language standardized for an odd purpose: Writing one word ata time...was Re: [Fwd: Re: "Tanasvale" in Portland, Oregon]

[Mike Cleven]

Dave Robertson wrote:
>
> Hayash mersi, Jeff,
>
> As usual your energy makes for creative results.
>
> AnyWho sounds like a neat research tool, and of course we should keep in mind the variant spellings that are used in the Old Style for many Chinook Jargon words.
>
> But it's remarkable how many CJ words there are which have gained virtually standardized spellings in the English alphabet:  "skookum", "kloshe", "illahee", "wawa", "chuck", "hiyu" or "hi-yu".
>
> Can any of you think of others?

Tyee.  Hyas.  Saltchuck (technically not a separate entry because of
"chuck", but more widely used in BC English than the latter).  Cultus
(at least in BC).  Tenas/tenass and hyak/hyack come to mind as examples
of words where there are two or three standard spellings; most of these
aren't in current English, of course; konamoxt/kunamoxt,
tamanass/tamahnous.

> These were words which were widely known and apparently relatively frequently used by speakers of English, and maybe for that reason they were or will be the last fragments of Chinook Jargon to be forgotten by Bostons.  (There's another one--"Boston"!)  Fodder for a brief paper in the subfield of linguistics now known as Language Death (for real).

Sprech(s)sterben, nichts?  But I thought the concept of "dead" languages
had recently been declared "old fashioned", and ac/pc term know is
"dormant languages".......

>
> It strikes my funnybone that one could fairly say CJ had, by its time of maximum expansion, become quite standardized in written form.  However, these standardized spellings applied mostly, I think, to "bons mots" of Jargon; meaning, to isolated words dropped into Northwest English discourse.  Compare this with the widely accepted use of "soundbites" of Latin, French, or Greek in literary English.

The other angle to look at this is that the local argot increasingly
substituted English words when a Chinook one was not available, or had
become old-fashioned sounding or simply not as useful; e.g. the mutation
from using "halo" and "wake" to "no" as in later times.  In this sense,
the survival of skookum, kloshe, illahee, etc. (tyee, hyas
tamanass/tamahnous for others) and even muck(et)y-muck is actual the
survival of the last remnants of the widely-spoken Jargon; its echoes
heard in the cadence and peculiar "hick" syntax on BC's Coast and
Interior, which is itself very much only a pidgin of "proper" English;
fewer words, a more basic construction, a direct, declamatory style,
scattered with special borrowed or adapted words; in the cases of these
Coastal and Interior communities many of these still, in fact, Jargon.
The idea here is that the Jargon may have influenced non-educated
"country" English, perhaps as much in style and mentality as in actual
words.

> When people wanted to demonstrate that they had an active grasp of spoken Chinook Jargon, it seems to me, they wrote it the way they perceived the sounds, rather than following the spellings of Gibbs' vocabulary or the like.  (I'm thinking of quotations like "Cla-how-you six!")
>
> Thoughts?

Dare I?  Just here to wonder if examples like "cla-how-you six!" are
somewhat proof of the oral culture by which the Jargon was spread rather
than by, or at best in addition to Gibbs and Shaw and other contemporary
"Learn Chinook" manuals; common phrases such as "hello, friend" being
learned "on the street" and not from "book learnin'".  That a lot of
people must have learned the Jargon orally is an interesting thought;
and what _were_ the literacy rates among 19th century frontiersmen and
BC-NW pioneers, anyway?

Re: the list of websearches, if anyone _hasn't_ dropped by
http://www.skookum.org, a work/education project for special needs
people who make hyas kloshe skookum lopes kopa sopena (very nice skip
ropes).  And as far as Hiyu, there's the site of the Seattle Hi-Yu
Festival at http://www.hiyu.com (which looks like a hoot).

MC