chinook/kalapuya (was Re: French-culture Illinois-Ohio etc a la Louisiana....

[Mike Cleven]

Conrad Hodson wrote:
>
> On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, Mike Cleven wrote:
> >
> > Try your five words, and your placenames; you've got an expert handy so
> > might as well find out....
>
> Well, "tyee" is chief, isn't it?  I think "chuck" is flowing water, and
> "skookum" is strong, powerful.

"chuck" means any water or fluid, whether a lake or river or something
in a cup; "out on the chuck" means out on a boat, usually on "the
saltchuck"; this is rarely used in ref to a lake.
>
> I've also been warned that white use of Chinook as a trade language led to
> Chinook insults being used as names for the Chinooks' neighbors--that the
> "Nootka" don't like being called that, for instance.  I've also heard that
> "Kalapuya" (spelled however) means "camas burner" and someone said that
> the work was Chinook and _not_ Kalapuyan, so is this another ethnic
> slur?  (As in, too dumb and shiftless to outsmart a salmon, or something
> like that?)  I live in former Kalapuyan territory, and they certainly did
> eat a lot of camas--the commonest sign of a Kalapuyan site is a
> root-cooking pit.

I'll refer this to the CHINOOK listserve, as there are a number of
Chinooks and Kalapuya in attendance there who might know more about
this; actually a few of them are both Chinook and Kalapuya so we might
hope for an interesting response (hi guys!)  [this has been bcc'd to the
listserve]
>
> As for the placenames, one thing I suspect is that a lot of those "cl" and
> "k" and "q" that you see in early white struggles to spell the native
> names are actually standing for some of those tongue-swallowing glottal
> stops and glottal starts that NW natives seemed to love.  (I had a high
> school buddy who spoke Tlingit--trying to duplicate one of the sounds left
> me in a five-minute coughing fit.)

I know what you mean; saying "five" in Lillooet involves some gurglings
and cracklings in the back of the mouth that I don't think I'll ever
quite get down (or up).  As for "cl", you can readily juxtapose this
with "kl" and "tl"; efforts to spell these languages, including the
Jargon, usually wound up choosing "kl" but "tl" describes the same
sound.  Go figure.
>
> Also, I understood that Chinook was actually the spoken birth-speech of
> the people of the lower Columbia.  Does anyone know whether they spoke the
> jargon because of all the trade that went up and down the river, or
> whether the other tribes learned Chinook for convenience when
> trading?  Chicken or egg?

Have to send you to the archives of the list for that
(www.linguistlist.org has 'em all archived).  Essentially it's worth
understanding that the old Chinook language is not the same as the
Chinook Jargon, although the latter is certainly based on the former.
It's a chicken-and-egg thing and sometimes the topic of hot (or at least
lukewarm) conversation.
>
> > > >
> > > Old Norse/Icelandic also has a middle voice, something most other
> > > Indo-Europeans had the decency to dump about three thousand years ago.
> >
> > That middle voice is a bitch; I remember trying to figure out the sense
> > of it.  Not exactly like a reflexive, right?
> >
> > >
> Actually, reflexive is the main thing it's used for--other uses are minor
> and somewhat archaic (by Icelandic standards).  I never really got
> expertise on that myself; just figured that an -sk on the end of a verb
> was a reflexive and let it go at that.


Well, sort of a reflexive; sometimes I'm not so sure; e.g. in the famous
Runesong: ulvr foedisk is skogi.  I suppose that does have a reflexive
context if you think about "breeding" and so forth, propagating
oneselves; but it's a strange usage IMHO.  Mind you, the whole Runesong
is rather strange....

MC