Camas; pre-CJ lingo; swastikas (fwd from A. Grant)

[Dave Robertson]

[Thanks to Anthony for this note.  The subject line is of my composition, so my apologies if you don't want swastikas linked with your name either, Anthony.  This is my opportunity to mention that one of the Chinook Jargon dictionaries I've got at home (F. Long 1909?) uses the swastika as a decoration, which would've raised few eyebrows as the Nazi party didn't exist yet.  And your remark about /kamas/ is valid, putting me in mind of the point made by Sally Thomason and other students of the 'Nootka Jargon' question, that the Nootkan words in CJ show White mediation.  --  Dave]

From:   Anthony.Grant3 at btinternet.com
To:   ddr11 at columbia.edu

Laxauya, Dave:

In regard to 'camas' in CJ it's interesting that the term doesn't show the initial uvular consonant anywhere in our records of CJ, which points to the term having been introduced by whites (which we now know to have been the case).  We find /kamas/ or /lakamas/.

As to trade vocabulary, there's an interesting term for a kind of canoe which is /aluudiq/ in Hanis Coos, and which has very similar names in Alsea, Upper Chehalis, possibly Tillamook (I'm not sure about that) and certainly in Quileute, in which it is analysable.  So here we have the name of a product developed around Neah Bay or LaPush being diffused (by flotation?!!?) down to southern Oregon.

Hitler may have been raised as a Catholic, but Catholics certainly don't want to be associated with him.  And he lived in a part of the world where Catholicism was dominant (most of Southern and Central Germany was RC).  Where he came across the swastika is less certain.  That there was interest in 'the mystic East' in Germany abouta century ago is clear from Hermann Hese's novel 'Demian' (Hesse himself was the grandson of Herr Gundert, compiler of the first modern Malayalam dictionary and a Protestant minister in India).  At that time the swastika was associated firmly with Eastern mysticism (some of John Sampson's Romani books in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, U of London, bear the mark, and Sampson was no fascist.).  Maybe there's a link somewhere with the Nazis' evil interest in the extirpation of the Roma (themselves of course of Indian origin)

Anthony

--
"Asking a linguist how many languages she knows is like asking a doctor how many diseases he has!" -- anonymous



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