Talk:Chinook Jargon
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[edit] Note on comment re usage by "American leaders" and "residents of Vancouver"
"American leaders sent communiques to each other, stylishly composed entirely in The Chinuk. Many residents of the British Columbia city of Vancouver choose to speak Chinook Jargon as their first language, even using it at home in preference to English."
- This strikes me as a very strange pair of statements. I think the first sentence must intend to refer not to "American leaders" (which would be like Presidents and Senators?) but to members of the old settler families of the Pacific Northwest; this was certainly true of much of the "old blood" in Seattle in the fin de siècle period and perhaps even up into the 1920s and 30s. But people with names like Joshua Green and Arthur Denny do not qualify as "American leaders". The trick is to think how to reword it. The second sentence, I'm pretty sure, can be improved greatly just by putting the verb into the past tense. Which I shall do forthwith. --Haruo 01:36, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
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- Teddy Roosevelt is said to have learned it on his trips to the Northwest and to Alaska, and various senators and other political magnates who came through either investing, big-game hunting or just drinking their way through the frontier. Senator Boies Penrose likely learned it during his hunting trips, for instance. I can't say for Washington and Oregon politicians and business leaders, but it's a truism that successive generations of British Columbia elites were raised with familiarity with the Jargon, including one famous nomination meeting of the BC Conservative Party when Richard McBride was first persuaded to run; the Jargon was used to exclude Central Canadians new to the province from the private discussion between provincial/colonial old-timers about taking control of the party (i.e. preventing carpetbaggers from hijacking it).
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- There is one cite, somewhere in Maj. Matthews Early Vancouver, of two ladies of Granville (Gastown) origin who had done well in the Klondike and were parlaying the lobby of some swank New York hotel, much to the astonishment of the surrounding New Yorkers, who had never imagined white girls to be capable of such barbaric sounds and speech, yet they were happily conversing in it (this cite may be in Alan Morley's Vancouver: Milltown to Metropolis which I'm currently re-reading so if I find it I'll provide the detailed reference. Matthews does comment that old pre-railway Gastown families maintained the use of Jargon at home into the early 20th Century (he's meaning his own era, 1920s-1930s), in preference to English.
[edit] Chinuk Wawa vs. Chinook Jargon
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- I do object to the use of The Chinuk, which is a modern spelling entirely inappropriate to the name the users being mentioned would have known the language by; especially when referring to it in the old-fashioned way, the Chinook. So Chinuk has been changed to the historically-correct Chinook. Linguistically-oriented CJers/Chinookologists do some weird and often arrogant things, including trying to creolize conventional spellings to some kind of non-English influenced standard; some kind of post-modern ideological rationale exists for such agendas, but it's not what those who made this tongue knew it as, or would have spelled it as. Making it look more exotic, supposedly, doesn't "de-whitify" it, if that's the goal of such fiddling with historical reality. My response to that is simple: English and French are historical components of the Jargon, so why are their words, spellings and pronunciations somehow inferior to the linguistically-preferred ones, which have no actual basis in history, only in the revision of it. Forced credolization is not proper creolization - or rather, it eventually becomes so, but at the expense of naturally-developed languages.24.80.121.207 08:56, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
Swingbeaver 10h03, 20 August 2005 (GMT-5h00) says:
- I am going to sit on this for a couple days, but so long as no one objects I would like to change the title of this page to "Chinook Wawa." Jargon is itself a mild perjorative, and in any case the article concedes that in academic circles "Chinook Wawa" is standard. Is "Chinuk Wawa" the spelling in Wawa? I can't find any reference to it in any article.
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- I object to the change; Jargon is only a pejorative if you want it to be; and it's the common name for this language throughout its historical region of use; the Jargon is always referred to just as that, or as the Chinook Jargon, or as "the old trade language". Chinook Wawa is only in vogue with the Grande Ronde folks and the linguists who've clustered around them; in BC you might have heard "the Wawa" but it's highly doubtful; everyone knew it as "the Jargon". Sure, you could solve this with a string of redirects and disambiguations, but myself I think it's cultural/historical hijacking to supplant the GR-preferred name for the long-standing historical one. If there's to be an entry Tshinuk-Wawa, as the purists spell it, then it should point at a lexicon/history that only concerns the users of that spelling, not the whole range of culture and history associated with the Chinook Jargon, which is a lot wider. Skookum1 23:37, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
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- I too object to the change. Chinook Jargon is what it's named in the books, and it is a "jargon". The Jargon is a treasured old form of speach that I learned from my father and gradparents, and a part of my Pacific Northwest heritage, but it is just a trade pidgin. If you think that "jargon" is perjorative, so be it. Certainly Chinook Jargon is not entitled to the same linguistic respect that, say, is due to one of the languages native to the Puget Sound or Inland passage most of which had an extensive art, oral literature, and history behind them (now lost in some cases). Tom Lougheed 6 June 2006
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[edit] List of Chinook Jargon placenames?
Thought of starting this, came here earlier to suggest it, wound up staying around to kibbitz and increase the wordlist. Did a lot of name-finding during some research work for the [Canadian Mountain Encyclopedia] - glaciers, creeks, plateaus, marshes, peaks, hills, what-not all over the place. Might start it later, i.e. another time; taking a break now and will probably get distracted onto something else when I sit back down.Skookum1 09:28, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
- I recognized a lot of the Chinook Jargon words as place names, so on a whim I made them links and was pleasantly surprised to find the articles already there. I avocate continuing that, and adding the Chinook translation to every existing article. Tom Lougheed 17:49, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Mamook vs. munk
It's since I began expanding the wordlist here that frustration set in when many idiomatic expressions common through the Skookum Illahee, such as mamook kloshe (mend, heal, fix), "can't" be put in place (supposedly) because that's not the Grand Ronde usage; and Grand Rondies would like all the rest of us to revise the historical Jargon according to their model (do you hear axes grinding? - you bet). The distinction between mamook and munk is one of those core things that make the reality what it is - that the creolized Grand Ronde Tshinuk-Wawa is a very different beastie than the Jargon as it was known in the old days (same as the Chinuk vs Chinook spelling variation preferred by linguistickese/academic types, in opposition to the bulk of historically recorded usages). I know on the Chinook Wiki project there's even some discussion about using GR/linguistics pronunciation/orthography in preference to the "bad" spellings created by those incompetent 'ol whiteys. Such arrogance, such revision; presumably though such a choice of "prounciation and orthography" implies the adoption of GR word-usages, including "munk" over "mamook" and more.
Why can't the linguists just admit that there was no "One Jargon" and that GR's Jargon is an evolution from the older Jargon, and should not be considered representative of it - or worse, that it is the "correct" form. You would have been laughed out of any rancherie or roadhouse north of Olympia or east of The Dalles.Skookum1 00:16, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Please check on moos-moos
Could someone more competent than me please check on how I expanded moos-moos?
I remember my grandfather using Chinook Jargon as part of his attempt to explain the English words "steer" and "heifer", I'm not confident that I've remembered it right.
I am really not qualified anyway: my family Jargon-using family were all almost completely WASPs (or WISPs?), and I still understand Chinook Jargon only poorly. And grandpa refused to explain what man stone moos-moos meant. I thought it was the neighbors' bull's name until I read stone = "testicles" in the vocabulary list. (Oddly, my sweet, rough old grandmother was not embarassed to often call skunks "stinky butt" in English. Hmmm.) Tom Lougheed 18:07, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
- humm opoots, but opoots isn't very graphic; it can just mean "the back end of something", as opposed to "bum" or "ass", neither of which are particularly bad words in English but the object itself is something you're not supposed to mention. Like, one supposes, "elbow" or "ankle" a hundred and fifty years ago, when those were considered erotic if displayed publicly. So while stone is very explicit, opoots is very not; similarly tatoosh for breast/milk.....it's all in the context. That hyas hyas stone illahee thing I quoted from Paul St. Pierre's Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse uses stone in a different capacity, but that's the Chilcotin variant of the Jargon and not within the narrow parameters of Chinookology's dependence on the Columbia/Georgia Strait Jargon sources; on the other hand, the speaker might have been meaning "the big MACHO mountains", which isn't inconceivable either if you have any idea what the Chilko Lake-Taseko Lakes area looks like. Anyway, what WOULD have grossed out your grandmother might have been humm thlwop opoots, which would specify the anus as opposed to the buttocks (Fr. cul vsderrière, Sp. culo vs. atras). At one of the two Jargon conferences I attended - the first one in Grand Ronde - I got the old ladies from Warm Springs chuckling about hyas skookum scotchman wootlat, which I used in a translation of a joke about a regimental sergeant-major who wakes up in hospital with a blue ribbon on his....wootlat. They got a good laugh out of it; but the prissy GR/chinookology crowd was already up in arms because Warm Springs, like all the rest of us, used mamook instead of munk, because to them mamook means "fuck", as in "do someone"; the Warm Springs ladies (elders all) were pretty offended when they were presumptuously corrected by one of the GR/Chinookology people; who also criticized an elder white person, the storekeeper from Warm Springs, for not speaking it "correctly". Which is as you can gather where my other comments about GR's prejudicial view of the Jargon come into play; and part of that is their own prissiness on terms like wootlat, munk/mamook and things like chinaman which they find inconvenient to their post-modern intellectualities and not-so-veiled puritanism......Skookum1 20:08, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Vocabulary is Ready to be Independent
I believe that the vocabulary is approaching being long enough to become an independent article. Tom Lougheed 18:07, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
I recently re-formatted the vocabulary list to make every Chinook Jargon word or phrase begin a new bullet. Everything is in very nearly the same order, just split up into bullets. It was too difficult to sort by alphabetical order, which may or may not be appropriate, since it's almost — but not quite — ordered thematically, now. Tom Lougheed 18:07, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
- I was wondering about this, too - but I'm unaware of any other language pages in Wikipedia which have separate word-list articles/lexicons. This is not a dictionary. There IS the Tshinuk-wawa Wiki, which has its own wordlist and will build a Wikidictionary of Jargon, ultimately if anyone ever bothers over THERE; in its present form the Chinook Wiki is biased towards Grand Ronde's creole and to a certain affective degree on the (unrelated) Kamloops Wawa script; I added the transliterations there into the usual historical-lexicon spellings.
- So anyway, not sure how to proceed, i.e. what the format/title of the new page should be. "List of words in the Chinook Jargon" doesn't cut it; I can see a Chinook toponymy - placename catalogue - but a full lexicon of the Jargon is as far as I understand not in the purview of Wiki's objectives.Skookum1 22:38, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Hyas Klootchman Tyee
Historically this almost always meant Queen Victoria, largely because the Jargon was relatively dead by the time Elizabeth II came to the throne. Its usage for a female Lieutenant-Governor would be unprecedented, and in terms of royal protocol, inappropriate; but users of the Jargon might not care much for royal protocol; but again, there were no female Governors nor Premiers; and Hyas Tyee is implicitly "king", so it's not even appropriate for a Premier. Anyway, this is just all an aside; an L-G is addressed as "Your Honour" so, in my latter-day estimation, a Jargonization of that would be yuronnur (if not by that spelling, rather than, say, maika kloosh nem). NB the city of Victoria was Bictoli, Queensborough/New Westminter was koonspa, so both her name and a variation on "queen" were already in the Jargon; the BC version of it anyway.Skookum1 19:49, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Recent fixes
There's a lot of non sequiturs and "loaded language" throughout bits and pieces of the article; I've been emending it where possible but it's rife with problems, I think, and bits of "knee-jerk language" with typically po-mo phrases turning up here and there; I REALLY object to the use of "European" in discussions of the Jargon, as the Jargon itself made a firm distinction between at least six or seven types of white man (King George Man, Boston Man, leplet, Pasiooks, Dutchman (all Europeans other than Brits and Pasiooks), Scotchman and Irish - I've heard that even lately: "Hey, Irish!" as a form of address to a stranger/acquaintance known to be Hibernian; in the Fraser Canyon to this day "Hey, Boston!" is the same as "Hey, white man"; even though the "American" meaning of "Boston Man" is long-forgotten. Similarly "Portyg(h)ee" turns up in older publications here, and it can be presumed that it was used in the Jargon/ or in the Jargon's adaption into local English; no terms for Japanese or Spaniards/Mexicans have surfaced, and "Hindoo" is a misnomer for Sikhs comes from the same mentality that called all non-Brit Europeans as "Dutchman" (be you Moravian, Croat or Galician, it didn't matter; primary meaning of Dutchman, also, was "German", not "Dutch").
Note my changes about "Hawai'ian immigrants" and my history-page comments about that. Some repetition in that paragraph now because I added something further/earlier about industrial/workplace usage, but that was meant in the context of necessarily-Jargon-speaking environments, be they bars in New Westminster/Vancouver or Kamloops or anywhere else; canneries etc; and mixed-race households (Hawai'ian or otherwise - the Chinese were often offered native wives but turned them down for racist reasons; whites, Hawaiians, blacks and others had no issues, except with marriage per se; so Chinese usage is thought to be mostly mercantile, and in environments such as canneries, as the railway gangs used Chinese interpreters; the Jargon was used by CPR/CNR First Nations railway workers, however, to the extent that the CPR was working on a manual of the Jargon when they stopped using it c.WWI; same translator for that project and the CPR's operations was working on a full Chinook bible (different from LeJeune's, that is). I'd like one day to see the colonial Hansard for the debate on making Chinook an official language...... Skookum1 16:46, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Re-inventing the wheel?
This is to Tom Lougheed and anyone else contributing to this page. AFAIK Wiki articles aren't supposed to be full vocabularies, and I'm wondering how to condense this list so that this doesn't become another online dictionary of the Jargon. I like the idea of letting people see the unusual nature and flavour of Jargon words and expressions; but the bigger this list gets the more it belongs on the Chinook MetaWiki; but there, the general public won't see it ... what to do? Thinking also that a more thorough discussion of the Jargon's impact on regional English lexicons and styles ("in the sticks", "high-ass" -> dumb-ass; Chinookisms where the gist of the Chinook is mirrored in English, either by expression or, as in the case of "high-ass", by sound/coincidence).Skookum1 06:10, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
- I don't have a pat answer for what to do with the vocabulary, but propose the following ideas:
- It's very helpful to see examples of how Chinook Jargon works, for instance how a root word like moos-moos or hyas combines with other words to produce English language equivalents.
- Colorful or funny phrases like "stinky butt" should be kept.
- If feasible, it is highly desirable for every Jargon word that is also a separate article in the Wiki (like Tatoosh Island or Tillamook, Oregon) ought to be listed.
- Tom Lougheed 6 June 2006
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- Could the organization of the vocab list be improved somewhat? heqs 10:07, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Proposed Category: Chinook Jargon placenames
Just stopped by Skookumchuck, British Columbia and rewrote it a bit. I have a good idea exactly how many Chinook Jargon placenames there are - hundreds, and significant places/things it the dozens, which are likely to be articles sooner or later. I've always wanted to do a Chinook toponymy...maybe this is the right venue for it, and a usefully expandable one too; at the very least a List of Chinook Jargon placenames would be a worthy page, I think.....Skookum1 08:12, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
- Yeah, list is the way to go I think. A shortened version could appear in this article with a link to the main list. heqs 10:06, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Paragraph 2
Why is Paragraph 2 not in Section 1? It seems to refer / relate to origins. normally there should only be one paragraph in the lead section of an article. Garrie 05:27, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
- This article needs major reorganization, as it was written and rewritten by various authors; and myself and a few others became more concerned with the word list after a while, quite frankly, which also quite frankly needs major trimming/reorganization. Feel free to move Paragraph 2 to the next section, although prioritizing it relative to what's in that section is a dubious task; it's a bit contradictory over all because of the competing opinions in current Chinookology, which I've really got to get busy doing at least a stub for soon as you can see by the redlink. For instance, I dispute the validity of the opening sentence of paragraph two - "great variety" is hardly the term for a few hundred words, and there's no PROOF that there were any proto-jargons, only implications; the myth of the proto-Jargon is largely a speculation by latter-day chinookologists bent on proving that the historical Chinook Jargon was a corruption of a "pure" Native/First Nations interlingua by unwanted European words; which is a crock, but it's also a sacred cow in modern chinookology. One reason I haven't edited the main text much, other than adding qualifying comments here and there and trying to straighten out the original propagandistic tone of the page as I found it, is because so much chinookology is inherently POV because of the various academic and tribal interests/agendas that area at stake...and I'm heavily POV/black-sheep in and of my own right, because of my aversion to the existing doctrines.....Skookum1 07:30, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] List of Chinook Jargon placenames begun
See List of Chinook Jargon placenames, also Talk:List of Chinook Jargon placenamesSkookum1 19:10, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Phonetics
I’d like to see phonetic glosses added to the words in the article. The ad hoc English-based orthography is somewhat difficult to interpret for people who don’t already speak Chinook Jargon. Also, stress is important but completely unmarked. I can do IPA if necessary, but I only have one or two written sources for the Jargon from which I can work that are phonetically accurate and show stress.
Also, in working on Tlingit, I’ve come across a number of loans from CJ. Some of them are reduced in ways that run counter to the expected pronunciation of the original CJ words, which leads me to believe that they were imported from odd or uncommon dialects of CJ. An example of this is Tl. wasóos [wə.sús] “cow”, from CJ moosmoos, where the first CJ syllable has been reduced to [wə], which is not what I’d expect if moosmoos was pronounced [ˈmus.mus] with the stress on the first syllable. Another group of words seem to have been pronounced with a sh in CJ instead of the more common s. An example of this is Tl. dóosh [túʃ] “cat” which comes from CJ puspus; since Tlingit has a perfectly serviceable [s] I find it strange that the s in pus(pus) would have been converted into an [ʃ]. This among other instances of [ʃ] appearing where [s] is expected leads me to believe that the CJ speakers that the Tlingit were in contact with used [ʃ] themselves, in words like *pushpush or *Bashton. Can any of you CJ people comment on this? — Jéioosh 22:26, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
(I should note that those derivations may look suspicious, but it’s because Tlingit lacks labials like [m], [p], and [b], and the voiced [l], so it adapts them to other sounds like [t], [kʷ], [x’ʷ], [n], etc. — Jéioosh 22:31, 17 August 2006 (UTC))
TumTum I would like to see some elaboration on this particular chinook word - its meaning and application. See TumTum.
'Tumtum is a Chinook Jargon term meaning "from the pulsations of the heart", or "the heart, the will, the mind."
Chinook Jargon was a simplified language comprised of words from English, French, and numerous languages belonging to Native people in the Northwest region of the North American continent. The Jargon was used widely in this region for basic communication and trading purposes and was most common during the 19th century.
The word Tumtum used to describe to the beating of the heart, as well as life forces.'
-- With difficulty I have pieced together these intriguing uses of this word. I was surprised that no reference has been made to the concept on Wikipedia.
Would someone better credentials to elaborate on this like to make a try?
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Tumtum"
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