Daniel Lee (and what he & Frost were speaking)

[David D. Robertson]

I asked a few days ago, "What were Lee & Frost speaking?"

>From E.H. Thomas' "Chinook:  A History and Dictionary" (1935), one of the
publications that reprints it, is this snippet from a hymn that Thomas
represents as being in Jargon:

Ak-ah eg-lah-lam en-si-kah
Mi-kah Ish-tam-tah em-e-hol-ew
Kup-et mi-kam toke-ta mi-mah
Mi-kah ek-ah-tlah gum-ohah
Kon-a-wa e-toke-ta ten-mah
Mi-kah dow-ah gum-e oh
Mi-kah an-kut-e gum-toh

[English translation, or more likely the original:]
Here now we unite in singing
Glory, Lord, unto thy name,
Only good and worthy praising,
Thou art always, Lord, the same.
Of the sun thou art Creator,
And the light was made by thee,
All things good, yea, every creature,
At the first thou madest to be.

[It would seem a line of the "Jargon" version was omitted by Thomas.]

A significant portion of the "Jargon" hymn is intelligible given a
knowledge of CJ:  en-si-kah "we"; mi-kah "thou"; kup-et "only"; toke-ta
~ "good"; kon-a-wa "all"; an-kut-e "in the past ~ at the first".

The rest of the hymn has the definite inflected look of the "Old Chinookan"
languages, for example with gender-, pronominal-, and number prefixes such
as in em-e-hol-ew "thy name", where I'd guess I'm seeing a masculine
singular e-, 2nd person singular possessive m-, and a root ~ e-hol akin to
the word yah-hul "name" found in a number of old CJ vocabularies.  We may
infer the above hymn is in Wasco-Wishram Chinookan (see quotation at end of
this message).

Lee and Frost apparently knew CJ.  This hymn is apparently not an example
of it.  A good question might be, to what extent is it non-CJ, though?  The
high frequency of the full-form pronouns en-si-kah, mi-kah, etc. (whereas
recorded texts from native speakers show these forms rather seldom, mainly
for emphasis) suggests a non-native usage of a Chinookan language.  I think
I've seen similar things going on in missionaries' use of Salishan
languages, like Father Le Jeune's Lillooet prayers & hymns, which I imagine
sounded like some exotic (at best) register of the language to native ears.

I'm interested in the question not just of how well missionaries acquired
Native languages, but also to what extent their imperfect use of these
languages resembled pidginization.

On Dec. 10, 1999, Rob Moore wrote on the CHINOOK list:
(...Daniel Lee, in fact, made some real headway in his own effort to learn
Wasco-Wishram, no mean feat), and left behind some really priceless
material.