Valdes Nootka vocabulary

[Mike Cleven]

David Lewis wrote:
>
> the other source I mentioned is actually not Pethick but John
> Kendrick's The Men with Wooden Feet: The Spanish Exploration of the
> Pacific Northwest. NC Press Limited , Toronto, 1985.
> Page 76 has a great photo of a page from Mozino's Noticias de Nutka.
> These Spanish vocabularies are apparently in Spanish archives. I think
> it is Junior Captain Don Cayetano Valdes who is mentioned in the
> Serial set and he anchored at Nootka on August 31, 1792 (p.9).
>
> a description of language and discourse is on pages 86-87.
> p. 87
> " I was able to Identify a few of the words because they have come
> into use in the lingua franca known to linguists as the Chinook Jargon
> which was still used on the Coast in my boyhood. Klutsma means a
> woman, mo huec or moech means a deer, and clush mean good. Tenas,
> which to Mozino meant "little boy," can mean this in Chinook lingue
> franca, although it often means just "little."
>
> Kendrick also has an appendix with a word list vocabulary in Spanish,
> Nootka and English.
>
> The question I have is whether the word list was created by Mozino or
> Valdes? I would think Mozino did this as it was common for commanders
> of expeditions to take credit for all the work their charges had done.
> I tried to scan the photo in the book, let me know if it came out
> alright.

The scan's pretty rough; not sure what parameters are used to change a
scan to a PDF, but this usually only works well with printed, not
written, text.  Recommend you try again as a GIF or JPG and post it that
way; and not compress it too much if it's a JPG.

At some point I'd like to assemble all the early Jargon lexicons - this
Spanish one (or more than one), the Barclay Sound RN document, and
others - as a side-by-side on the web for study and reference.

The way to find out who/when this wordlist relates to is no doubt in the
handwriting; a comparison to the log-keepers for Mozino, Valdez, Quadra
etc.; if this wasn't penned by the presiding captain at the time, which
given Spanish bureaucracy doesn't seem likely (ranking officers had
secretaries).  Also, since the Spanish had been in possession of Fort
San Miguel (Nootka) for a while by 1792, it seems likely that this might
precede that date by at least a year or two; there _must_ have been
working wordlists around the fort....

MC