Hyack Festival

[Dave Robertson]

James,

I agree.  I've never come across a CJ term for "the" or "a" Gold Rush.  

Why not?  Two ideas occur.

* "gol hyack" would be mighty flowery.  I've noted here before, based on my
work with hundreds of texts of what some might call "street Chinook", that
metaphors weren't favored.

* I believe pidgins lack many sociolinguistic features that are common to
non-pidgin languages.  The big difference, it seems to me, is that pidgins
are used in looser-knit communities.  Fellow-speakers of a pidgin don't have
as many cultural points of reference in common as (especially mother-tongue)
speakers of non-pidgins have.  One broad result is that pidgins don't
contain many names.  

Put these related ideas together, and it makes some sense that CJ had its
own vocabulary of names for places, and kinds of people, that speakers were
very likely to see with their own eyes.  (Think of "styuil haws" [church]
and "skukum haws" [jail], "sawash" [Indians] and "hwait man" [whites], in
the Kamloops area.)

People and places you couldn't quite "put your finger on", like "Belgians"
or "Sikhs", "Canada" or "New Westminster", tended to be labeled by words
borrowed from non-pidgin languages -- or not much spoken of.

I apply these same ideas to words for historical events.  If anyone did talk
about "the Gold Rush" in CJ, I can well imagine them using that English
phrase.  

--Dave R

On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:53:41 -0400, James Crippen <jcrippen at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

>On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 20:58, David D Robertson <ddr11 at columbia.edu> wrote:
>> I don't recall this being mentioned before; sorry if we've gone over it.  I
>> just wanted to note an annual celebration in New Westminster, BC.  It's
>> called the Hyack Festival -- apparently because it's Gold Rush-themed.
>> (Hyack=rush)
>
>"Gol hyack"?
>
>I get the feeling that CJ speakers at the time probably didn't call it
>anything, or maybe "hiyu basten cheechako". I think it was the
>newspapers that labeled the "Gold Rush", specifically Cassiar,
>Klondike, etc.
>
>James

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