Daniel Lee (and what he & Frost were speaking)

[Scott Tyler]

Nice Hymn,
Except for the Jargon it reminds me of Sahaptin (Nez Perce Hymns).
Scott
----- Original Message -----
From: "David D. Robertson" <ddr11 at COLUMBIA.EDU>
To: <CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 8:14 PM
Subject: Daniel Lee (and what he & Frost were speaking)


> 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.