chinook wawa

[Linda Fink]

I am confused about all the talk about different varieties of Chinook
Jargon. I have quite a few jargon dictionaries (Gibbs, Gill, Thomas,) as
well as the dictionary produced by Eula Petite, Grand Ronde tribal elder who
taught the language here in Grand Ronde in the early 80s. They all look like
the same language to me, albeit with different spellings and some different
words and, of course, some different pronunciations.

Cory Cook has learned jargon from nothing but (white man's) dictionaries and
so, naturally, does not pronounce all the words as they are pronounced in
Grand Ronde (or perhaps anywhere). Yet at the conference this summer he
spoke jargon with Ila Dowd, tribal elder and one of the last surviving
speakers of CJ, and she understood him perfectly. He did not tell me this --
I was sitting next to her at the time.

It seems to me that what Tony and Henry have done is standardize the
spellings. They have of necessity made new symbols for the sounds that have
no English equivalents. But the language is chinook wawa, whether it's
spoken in Kamloops, Warm Springs, Grand Ronde or wherever. Just as English
is English whether it's British English, Australian English, Southern U.S.
English or Brooklynese. It may take a bit of concentration for one group to
understand the other, but we can do it. I, for one, would prefer to learn
British English as a "standard" and then pick up Brooklynese if I needed it
rather than the other way around.

Tony and Henry teach, it seems from what y'all are saying, a British English
type CJ. I think we're darn lucky to have them doing it!

But with all due respect, I think sometimes you linguist types get a little
carried away with the differences. ;-)

Linda Fink   linda at fink.com
http://www.fink.com/linda/teenagers/   http://www.fink.com/farm/5.html