Review of Hale from The Critic, Oct. 25, 1890

[Liland Brajant ROS�]

--- Dell Hymes <dhymes at adelphia.net> wrote:
> Dear Liland,
>
>         Thank you so much for recovering and sending
> the
> pieces about Horatio Hale.  I have long had an
> interest
> in him, just because he was one of the first to take
> an
> interest in the languages and peoples of the Oregon
> territory.  So again, thanks.
>
>                         Dell

You're certainly welcome, Dell. I suppose you saw
Golden had one of your books in his bibliography. :-)

The following is my retyping of the text of a review
of Hale's _Manual_ that appeared in the New York
magazine _The Critic_ dated October 25, 1890. (I
photocopied this from a copy in the University of
Washington's Suzzallo Library a number of years ago,
and like so many of my papers I managed to misplace it
till quite recently.

I've endeavored to reproduce the spelling and the
punctuation as exactly as I could; where this meant
deviating from my notion of the correct, I have added
[sic]; in the case of "untook" I'm pretty sure
"undertook" was intended; "tha" on the other hind
might be "the" or "that" (uk or ukuk); and "nasal
French *u*" could be a typo for "nasal French *n*",
though I have other competing conjectures.

 I have used

— This little volume...

an em dash to simulate indentation, and

*Pasaiuks*

asterisk-enclosure to indicate italicization. The
review is unsigned, and I have no idea who wrote it.
Perhaps someone familiar with _The Critic_ and/or with
the pool of potential reviewers of such items in 1890
may recognize the style? Anyhow, here goes...

[Oct]ober 25 1890 — [p. ] 201

The Critic

Published Weekly, at 52 Lafayette Place, New York, by
The Critic Company

Literature

[...]

A Western Volapuk*

— This little volume is one in which Prof. Schuchardt
of the University of Grätz would revel, as himself the
foremost European collector of mixed idioms,
international jargons, and ' Pidgin ' languages of
every sort. The Chinook Jargon of Oregon is a
practical Volapük of incalculable worth to the traders
of the Northwest Territories, Western British America,
and it may be even Alaska. This jargon—peculiar to
this region—is a natural growth, not an artifical
jumble, like Volapük : it grew up out of the
necessities of the traders of Oregon and Washington
territories in their intercourse with fifteen or
twenty different Indian tribes all of whom spoke
different and mutually unintelligible dialects, harsh,
unpronounceable, changeable as the chameleon. It is a
true international speech used by Americans, English,
French-Canadians and Indians (Nootkas and Chinooks)
and composed principally of words from their
languages. Puget's Sound is the Northwestern
Mediterranean, full of a dusky population like the
Malay Archipelago where a similar jargon is spoken,
and abounding in European and Asiatic (Russian) types
in daily and perpetual contact with the aboriginal.
— The distinguished Canadian ethnologist Horatio Hale
untook [sic!], as far back as 1841, to reduce this
jargon to writing and reproduce it as the linguistic
and ethnological portion of the researches made by the
U. S. Exploring Expedition of that year. He found
twelve distinct Indian languages there to grapple
with, each as distinct from the other as English is
from Hebrew; and the problem of intercourse with the
tribes would have been insoluble had not the explorers
been assisted in their work by the ' Trade Language '
or Chinook ' lingo ' that had already slowly risen out
————
* A Manual of the Oregon Trade Language, or Chinook
Jargon. By Horatio Hale $1.[2]0. New York: Scribner &
Walford.

[p. ] 202 [begins here]

of the *débris* of numerous tongues that were
intelligible. Missionaries, Hudson's Bay people, and
early settlers had coöperated with the Indians from
the beginning of the last century in the construction
of this idiom, which is now what Italian is to the
Mediterranean and Chippeway was among the Eastern
tribes of the United States. Among these Indians the
Chinooks were particularly quick in catching strange
sounds, and to them is due the lion's share, on the
Indian side, in the evolution of the jargon. Lewis and
Clark found the language in crude use in 1804, and
later on, the Astor expeditions celebrated by
Washington Irving gave the permanent artistic shaping
to it. The Chinook dialect underlies the whole as its
skeleton, upon which has been built a superstructure
of numerals, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, and
verbs derived from the English, French, Canadian
*voyageurs*, an occasional word from other aboriginal
tribes, and a series of singular and expressive
onomatapœias [sic] imitative of sounds, actions, and
the like, such as *tiktik* for watch, *tumtum*, the
heart, *liplip*, from the sound of boiling water, and
*tin-tin*, for the tintinabulation of a bell. Mr. Hale
found some 250 words in use in 1841; in 1863 these had
increased to nearly 500, half of them being Chinook,
94 French, 67 English; the Flathead Indians furnishing
39, the Nootka 24, and miscellaneous sources about 40.
Some of the terms are very queer: thus *Boston* stands
for American, *Kinchotsh* (King George's men) for
English, and *Pasaiuks* for French, tha [sic] last
word being a supposed representative of *Français* !
— The Indians cannot pronounce an *f*, and *r*, or a
nasal French *u* [sic]; nor a *d, q, v* or *z*; the
English *j* is changed to *ch* or *tsh*, and so on.
The result is a language of odd phonetic
characteristics, no grammatical inflections, no
plural, no tenses, and but one true preposition,
*Kopa*, used a good deal like the Louisiana Creole
*apé*, for all sorts of relations,—to, for, at, in,
etc.  Tones, looks, and gestures fill up, as in spoken
Chinese, the interstices of conversation, which
revolves in the monotonous but sufficient grooves of
500 words.
— Mr. Hale's history of the formation of this speech
is interesting in the extreme, and is accompanied by
an abundant lexicon, songs, hymns, a sermon, and
translations from the Bible. The two words of this
dialect which the reviewer remembers most frequently
to have heard in his Northwestern travels were
*potlatch* (give !) and *muckamuck (food).



=====
Ros' Haruo = Leland Bryant Ross
(Ros' estas la familia nomo)
Persona TTTejo : http://www.scn.org/~lilandbr/
Esperanto * Kantoj * Baptismo * Himnoj * Melvilo * Sushio
Seatlo * Lingvoj * Beletro Usona * dxwlEšucid * ktp






		
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