Tilicum

[Liland Brajant Ros']

>From: Andy Horton <BMLSS at COMPUSERVE.COM>
>Reply-To: Andy Horton <BMLSS at COMPUSERVE.COM>
>To: CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
>Subject: Re: Tilicum
>Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 21:20:39 -0500
>
>Hello,
>
>I made a mistake with my previous message. I did not realise there was a
>Chinook tribe as I tried to find a list of tribes and match them up with
>the languages (it this is possible). Of course (or maybe), any one word
>like "tilicum" could be common to several tribes and languages.

Well, it's certainly possible that there could be non-Chinookan native
languages that borrowed "tilicum" from the Wawa (Jargon), but I think it's
unlikely, as it's not a foreign concept so they probably got along fine
using their own words for "people", "relatives", "friends", "villagers",
"commoners" or whatever. At least in Lushootseed (Puget Sound Salish), the
native language with which I am most familiar, the borrowings from Chinook
Jargon (like the borrowings from English) tend to be for newly introduced,
nonindigenous concepts or items, like "devil" or "American" or "train" or
"Holy Spirit".

I'm not sure in what sense you are using the term "tribe"; much of the
Northwest Coast culture area (basically from about the northern end of the
California coast up to the southeastern end of the Alaskan coast was not
particularly politically organized above the village level. Of course, now,
as a result of a century and a half of acculturation, govenrmentally imposed
consolidation on reservations, and the need for structures able to deal
with, withstand, and at times contend against the US and Canadian
governments, there are "tribal" structures that do not have roots in
pre-contact culture, ... and each village (even to some extent each family)
had its own language, incrementally different from its nearest neighbors, so
that it is virtually impossible to say where we are talking "dialect" and
where we are talking "language", much as on the Continent you can go village
by village from Friesland to Holland to Luxemburg to SW Germany to
Switzerland to Liechtenstein, passing through a number of essentially
mutually incomprehensible local languages, yet never encountering two
next-door villages who can't understand each other's local speech (of course
the "official" languages are clearly demarcated, but they are in many ways
artificial constructs imposed on the less well defined "real" language
area).

lilEnd

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