This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Chinook Jargon article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
![]() | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | The contents of the Chinook Jargon use by English-language speakers page were merged into Chinook Jargon on November 18, 2011. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page. |
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 10 September 2021 and 31 December 2021. Further details are available
on the course page. Student editor(s):
Kathleen.stone.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 19:01, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 11 September 2018 and 31 December 2018. Further details are available
on the course page. Student editor(s):
Kiahwwwl.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 17:33, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
Recusing myself from quality assessment; but article does need revision/expansion; eventually separate article on the Grand Ronde Wawa currently spoken in OR, which differs from the "traditional" or standard historical Jargon(s). ---- Skookum1 (6 May 06)
"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."
See also more recent Talk:Chinook Jargon#Chinuk Wawa vs. Chinook Jargon revisited
Swingbeaver 10h03, 20 August 2005 (GMT-5h00) says:
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 (until Iona Campgnolo and Rita Johnston, respetively); 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)
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)
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)
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)
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. Ga rr ie 05:27, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
Lewis and Clark were greeted in recognizable Chinook WaWa as documented by their own journal. This is a pretty good indication that the language was in use prior to extensive contact with cheechakos. Certainly in early contact times it went through a major evolution as witnessed by the number of European loan words -- which possibly displaced some harder to pronounce native words. However, in pre-contact times, all the tribes in the Northwest had their own language and yet there was extensive trade and intermarriage between them, so a shared language would have been a logical development. The Chinook tribe in particular was noted for their extensive trading expeditions. I have heard two different stories from two different elders which indicate that Chinooks went as far south as Mexico on their pre-contact trading journeys. Another indication of prior use is that an elder from the Lummi tribe (near Canadian border) told me a traditional story about an event that occurred in pre-contact times and taught me the song to go with it, the song is in Chinook WaWa. It's possible that the song was composed later, but it's just as likely that the song was composed in pre-contact times. Just because we did not keep written records does not mean that something did not occur. It would be interesting to look for place names and other indications of cj use in California and Mexico. It is not helpful to be so cavalier in dismissal of Indian Oral Traditions.
Manyshoes (
talk)
20:24, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
I suspect that "great variety" refers to the number of different source languages. Manyshoes ( talk) 20:24, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
See List of Chinook Jargon placenames, also Talk:List of Chinook Jargon placenames Skookum1 19:10, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
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"
Well, we know that french and english were part of chinook jargon, but what about the native languages that made the vast majority of the vocabulary? Lashootseed is one, Can we get a list going for the definition?
As it stands in the article now, this is the definition: kamuks or comox — dog. This would have originally referred to a now-extinct species of domestic dog once common in the region, which was raised for its wool and meat. This breed is often depicted in drawings and paintings from the earliest eras.
This seems to be vandalism to me, but I don't know the subject area well enough to be sure. Can somebody who does know confirm or deny this?
At the very end of the article, just in front of the categories is the following text which is commented out so it does not display (see below). Should it be included anywhere, or expunged? j-beda 13:23, 4 July 2007 (UTC)
In British Columbia, Yukon and throughout the Pacific Northwest a pidgin language known as the Chinook Jargon emerged in the early 19th Century which was a combination of Chinookan, Nootka, Chehalis, French and English, with a smattering of words from other languages including Iroquoian and Hawaiian thrown in. The Jargon had no fixed form, and — depending on the origin of the speakers and the locality — words from other languages were also incorporated: In the Puget Sound area of Washington, one account describes the adoption of the Norwegian/Scandinavian words glemde ("forgot") and husker ("remember"); in the writings of guide-outfitter Ted "Chilco" Choate, of Gaspard Lake in the Chilcotin Country, comments that Gaelic as well as Chilcotin were components of Jargon usage in that region, but does not provide any examples.
Chinook, as the Jargon is usually known, is normally considered an aboriginal language, but it was in its day the lingua franca of the Northwest Coast and Plateau and was often the language of workplace and home even in non-native environments. It was, in other words, a language of all peoples in the BC and the Pacific Northwest and was not exclusively native. So much so that during the colonial period of the 1860s a proposal to make it an official language was half-tabled in the colonial Legislative Assembly but was not passed, and in 1903 Richard McBride was recruited to run for the first-ever BC Conservative leadership in Chinook, so as to thwart eavesdropping by "Canadians", as people from Eastern Canada were still known at that time. Court proceedings involving natives were often in Chinook, and while court translators for Chinook were present, typically justices, magistrates and government agents themselves spoke passable Chinook.
On the other hand, efforts by the Diocese of Kamloops to separate their Catholic First Nations flock from the largely Protestant cultus whitemans (cultus means "bad, worthless, useless, ordinary") produced a separate script based on the French Duployan shorthand and a large amount of ecclesiastical translations as well as community bulletins of the diocese in a short-lived publication named the Kamloops Wawa ("talk from Kamloops"), and sermons were regularly delivered in Chinook at native churches throughout BC, even into the 1960s.
A darker side of the Jargon's role in native life is connected to the residential school systems, where the speaking of native languages was forbidden and rewarded with beatings. Despite this threat, First Nations children from all the cultures speaking the many different traditional languages in the province found they shared a common tongue in the Chinook, and it became the secret language of the schools - and punishable for being used, although only a few years before the churches running the schools had themselves used the Jargon in teaching and evangelical activities. Despite the Jargon being forbidden, its secretive use in the schools furthered its spread in the BC-wide native community as those children returned to their communities, often not knowing any of their traditional language and unable to communicate with parents and elders. The circumstances of Jargon usage in the schools also created a feeling among natives that it was their language, and as at the same time massive immigration to BC obliterated the old Jargon-speaking non-native culture, such that a linguistic divide was created where many non-natives speaking the Jargon or using Jargon words did not even know it was native in origin, and natives themselves preferred not to share it with outsiders because of its function as an intertribal language. By the mid-20th Century, Chinook was the dominant language among elders in most native communities and was a threat to the traditional languages. Because of this, the movement to restore the traditional languages has largely suppressed Chinook materials and, while many young natives can understand some of the Chinook, it has largely passed out of use.
Its widespread usage in the region left its impact on regional English, which still uses many Chinook words ( skookum, saltchuck, tyee). Also notable are "Chinookisms", which range from borrowings such as "in the sticks" to a certain style of English delivery with simplified grammar. The evolution of slang terms such as "dumb-ass" may come from the Chinook hyas (big, important; found in English as "high-ass"), tenas (small, a child), tamanass (magic, spirits).
It was my understanding speakers of the Chinook Jargon (and I think this name is the only appropriate one at this point) in the Kanaka village next to Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River on the Washington side were the first to raise a generation of native speakers, which by many definitions is the criterion for definition as a language rather than a pidgin. The question of creole is a different question from what I gather. The story goes the Hudson Bay Company officials back east in Canada (Britain claimed the territory down to the Columbia River) grew alarmed at the prospect of a heathen population arising with a unified speech or at least didn't want the corporation's name tarnished, and sent out missionaries to teach the native speakers English and Christianity. Kanaka means Hawaiian of course; there were Hawaiian canoe crews brought in from the then Sandwich Islands to help navigate the waterways of Pacific America for the fur trade. It's interesting to note, for me at least, competing visions on the American side regarding the push westward. Jefferson had envisioned new states, read national entities or countries, emerging to the west of the United States, bound by a common origin and language in fraternal ties with the mother country in the east, while Astor largely engineered what came to be known as manifest destiny by establishing American outposts, including Astoria on the Columbia. As it turned out, race decided the territorial dispute over what came to be known as the Washington territory, the southern stretches of the Columbia territory bordering Oregon: George Washington Bush, a black (or East Indian) homesteader, was denied entry into Oregon territory because of the racist laws there and set up house across the river in Tumwater, taking a native woman as wife. It was also my understanding that Tumwater is named after Tum-tum, a native and perhaps Chinook Jargon word meaning waters, because of an abundance of natural fresh water springs in the area. "Tumwater" is thus a bilingual reduplication. Does it belong on the list of Jargon place names? My cursory knowledge of Washington state and Pacific Northwest native languages says that some were/are not Lushootseed or even Salishan at all but were probably present before the Salishan invasion from the Alberta Plateau about AD 1000, IIRC. The languages in coastal British Columbia are even more varied. From what I gather non-Salishan languages contributed to the Chinook Jargon as much as Salishan languages did. I don't really see the need to call the pre-European trading language a proto-pidgin unless pidgin is defined as the natives' attempt to speak the conquerors' European language. It seems to have been fully-fledged before the arrival of Europeans and was quite capable of assimilating European elements. That said, it's great to see this on wikipedia, and it's amazing to learn that there are still speakers beyond the unrecognized (by the BIA) Chinook tribe on the Columbia up in British Columbia. It would be helpful to have a graphic or two illustrating the Duployan shorthand orthography mentioned. International phonetics in brackets after the words on the word and place name lists would also be helpful, and also a more direct link to on-line versions of essential works (Franz Boas?) on the Jargon (which isn't a jargon at all but rather a language as described above, but which should retain its historic name because of reference, primacy in naming conventions etc. "The language known as the Chinook Jargon.")
The business about "American leaders" (above) is more or less true from what I remember reading, government officials translated English into Chinook Jargon at treaty-signing gatherings and in various dealings with the native tribes. Prominent early American figures in the territory also knew the Jargon.
I can't resist an excerpt from a native Washingtonian, born in Olympia, whose family founded Oysterville along the Columbia River and whose poem contains a number of Chinook Jargon place names. It shows a certain feeling for native words and vital cross-pollination with English into the 20th century:
Chet loved to WALLA WALLA/
In breakers warm and wet/
In all DUWAMISH water/
Would splash and WOLLOCHET.
And was he brave?/
WENATCHEE!/
And also ELOCHOMAN/
‘Til LATAH he fell in with/
A LILLIWAUP named Anne.
ALLALLA PALOUSE was Annie/
‘Lor LUMMI, wasn’t she though?/
She had ASOTIN something/
That should have laid CHETLO.
She saw him in DEWATTO,/
Afloatin’ on his back,/
With TATOOSH on his TUMTUM/
That made her lips go smack!
Now WHATCOM over Annie?/
‘Twas love ATTALIA that,/
Her heart went HAMMA HAMMA,/
Her teeth went KLICKITAT!
She said, "You are MALOTT dear;/
WYNOOCHEE kiss me pet?"/
The MATTAWA her ardor,/
Was not returned by Chet.
So ANACORTES Chester,/
She has to HAVERMALE,/
But he replies, "TONASKET!/
OHOP off. Hit the trail!"
"NASELLE me your embraces,"/
She begs him with sweet moan./
"My family’s ALGONA/
And I must sleep alone."
With METHOW in her madness,/
Once more the girl began./
"I SEKIU, and you only . . ./
ALAVA you!" SPOKANE.
excerpt from "Omak Me Yours Tonight, or, Ilwaco Million Miles for One of Your Smiles: A ballard of Washington State," copyright 1972 Willard Richardson Espy (1910-1999)
Hypatea 14:34, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
Yes, Skookum, I was wrong about Tumwater. That's something locals told me, that the place used to be called Tum-Tum, don't know exactly. For some reason I pictured Grand Ronde in BC although the article(s) say clearly it's in Oregon. Nowhere did it say the Jargon was Salishan-based either, I don't know why I thought it was important to point out it wasn't, except that it is interesting or might be interesting in the article to mention the Wakashan, Salishan and Penutian (which includes Mayan, Chinook proper, Araucanian and others) families and their affiliations. Vi Hilbert, the Lushootseed scholar, mentions the non-Salish groups in western Washington. IIRC the Puyallup had something to suggest a non-Salish linguistic substrate.
Regarding Bush and competing claims to the territory, it was my understanding that the "green line" ran roughly somewhere between the Nisqually Delta (Ft. Nisqually) and Steilacoom (Ft. Steilacoom) for a time, George Bush occupying the southlands for the USA, although the present forts were built later. Interesting to note in the entry Oregon boundary dispute tha the phrases "54' 40" or fight!" and "manifest destiny" both came out of the dispute.
Franz Boas only recorded a few things in Chinook Jargon it seems. The links to the Jargon dictionaries in the entry are very good. The "Mystery Dictionary" on the AT&T page looks to be verbatim with Costello's list in The Siwash (1895) may be from the Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon printed in Olympia in 1873 mentioned by Shaw. The place names seem to center around Olympia and Union City (now just Union, WA; the city must have never developed as expected). The Washington State Library in Olympia or the Smithsonian might have a copy of the dictionary mentioned by Shaw so this could be checked.
For whatever reason, HBC apparently saw fit to break up the emerging scene at the Kanaka village.
Point taken on international phonetics; do recordings (Smithsonian or elsewhere) exist of "native" Jargon speakers? A link on the page to something like that would be very good. Lushootseed phonetics are very different to English and other European languages. From what I understand the double T in Seattle merely represents an attempt to render the closest thing English has to a glottal stop, while the L in Seattle is an entirely different sound in Lushootseed. I believe Vi Hilbert renders this L-ish sound as l with a ~ through it. I'd be interested to know if there were any Hoh/Quileute contributions to the Chinook Jargon and more about the Spanish, which is mentioned by some but not others. The BC writer Anne Cameron, who can't always be trusted to transmit native lore correctly, I hear, mentions oral traditions concerning the arrival of the Spanish ships somewhere on or near Vancouver Island. The Olympic Peninsula was also claimed and named by the Spanish. Russians were also involved in the fur trade, sailing down to the Russian River in California, but there seems to be no Russian in the Jargon. Interesting why not.
Hypatea 15:29, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
In reading over teh recent rewrite I found it necdessary to start placing cite templates, because a lot has been added that's entirely speculative and also really about the "proto-Jargon", which isn't the same thing any more than the Grand Ronde Chinuk Wawa is the same thing; despite certain academics' agendas that they're all the same, THEY'RE NOT. The downplaying of teh white role in teh actual Chinook Jargon (i.e. the one shared with non-native cultures) is clearly on display in the recent edits, as is the commentying out of the entire orioginal content of this article, which amounts to a deletion; add to Wikipedia.....thte claims that there were Asian and Hawaiians words are spurious - unless tyee is really Chiinese tai and thre's omething else than kanaka out there from "Polynesian". BC and AK area dialeccts of CJ are mentioned as having Russian and Gaelic, and Pasco says there were Norwegian/Swedish words in Puget Sound....but funny how the professional Chinookologists just aren't interested in that, but more in proving that white people weren't capable of speaking it and it's not really their langauge etc etc etc. The POV template can come off when t6he p.c.-massage is taken out ("anything p.c. is inherently POV") and also when the ingrate who commented out the original article integrates thte material back in, instead of tries to hide it in the dustbin. This kind of behaviour is eventaully going to show up at a linguistics/history conference about the puerile and destruction behaviour of Chinookological "experts" who don't want to discuss things, rather censure adn ban them. Disappointing; I would have thought you guys had grown up by now. Skookum1 ( talk) 14:30, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
I don't know what has transpired previously on these pages, I have only recently joined this discussion and I am not about to wade into the middle of an argument. But with regard to Hawaiian/Polynesian words finding their way into the language that is entirely possible. What few people outside of the Chinook tribe seem to be aware of is that in pre-contact times there were multiple incidents of visits from ocean-going Polynesians. And in at least one case a shipwreck resulting in the survivors becoming permanent residents. This is what our oral traditions tell us.
Manyshoes (
talk)
22:15, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
I have also heard an account of a shipwreck that was probably Chinese in origin. The bottom of the ship was lined with sheets of copper - presumably to prevent barnacles. The copper was striped from the ship and highly valued. I do not know if any of the Chinese survived, but clearly there have been a lot of different peoples coming to these shores even in pre-contact times. I also remember about 10 or 15 years ago there was a Japanese fishing boat with a broken engine that managed to drift all the way to (California?) So clearly, ocean crossings are possible, and they have been happening for a long time. Polynesian artifacts have also been found in the San Juan Islands. Manyshoes ( talk) 03:01, 19 February 2010 (UTC)
The former is theoretical, althoug I've found in Costello's 1909 publication the idea that a predecessor jargon existed was out there even back then; the Proto-Jargon shoudl be a separate article, and efforts by certain academic agendas to equivocate the two are citable only because they've theorized about it; but a theory isn't a fact....rather than add another cite template, here's the wordiing that's bothering me, although there are similar obfuscations elsewhere in the article:
Better worded as "The Proto-Jargon".....the historical meaning of Chinook Jargon is clearly that form which integrated English, French and other non-PacNW languages, and is not a reference to the Proto-Jargon, which clearly is a different beastie, as also the modern form in GR (which doesnt' even have a common vocabulary with the Warm Springs variant, much less any a priori "correctness" over forms found farther north; or superior to Chinook Jargon use by English-language speakers, which is mis-titled anyway as Germans, Scandinavians, Chinese, French etc and others used it as well.....but who as speakers get derided by indigenously-biased linguists as "incapable ofpronouncing it properly"...pretty funny considering the mangling of English and French borrowings (but boy would "we" ever get nailed for saying natives were "incapable"), and totally untrue given the phonological palette of the Gaelic and Germanic and other European peoples present in the region. Skookum1 ( talk) 18:50, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
As per the remaining fact template re "indianized" GR chinuk-wawa, as noted taht was Tony Johnson's own term; another used by the mascot-linguists is "creolized", and refers to the induction of newer native words adn the getting-rid-of non-aboriginal words (mostly the English ones, FRrench ones are for some reason OK). And also "more Indianized" pronunciation. I'm surprised Holton didn't include this in his book because it was the subject of long discussions at one of the Chinuk Lu?lu's and a bit of a bragging point by GR indigenous people who were proud of it. There are cites available within CHINOOK-L, if that's a suitable citation to use; would take some digging, but more likely it should be in materials published by GR and whatsisname, the linguist who works with them. D. Robertson, if you're reading this you know exactly what I'm talking about. Any progress on finding actual CJ usage in different parts of BC, or are you still trying to integrate everything frrom a GR perspective? Warm Springs, Colville etc. remain undocumented forms; and any number of BC peoples have tapes of CJ users kept under lock-and-key to prevent their being studied; non-aboriginal source informants die off because of disinterest/disregard by academics because they're not aboriginal.....ethnic myopia is the curse of CJ/PacNW historical studies IMO. Skookum1 ( talk) 18:59, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
that got built before I and others contributing at the time knew about content parameters; should it be migrated to the CJ Wiki, or into Wiktionary, or where? Some should remain because of their continuing use today (mowitch, e.g.); the idea was to give a demonstration of the fluidity of meanings; as there can be no "proper pronunciation" despite GR-biased academics' inclination to claim that theirs is teh "right one". Skookum1 ( talk) 18:52, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm starting a new threat on this since the one below is a bit messy.
In my understanding, Chinook Jargon refers to the pidgin spoken around the Northwest. Chinuk Wawa, on the other hand, is the name of the creolized version of said pidgin spoke at Grand Ronde, OR. Despite claims below that the spelling 'Chinuk' is used to 'de-whitify' the language (which is a largely incoherent statement anyway; the Chinook peoples still use that spelling for their ethnic identity), the speakers and community members at Grand Ronde prefer the term (and spelling) 'Chinuk Wawa' for their language.
I think it can remain Chinook Jargon throughout the rest of the page, but in the section where it mentions how it is called by those at Grand Ronde, it should remain 'Chinuk Wawa'.
This issue of spelling and pronounciation is not uncommon in the Northwest, and should simply be glossed over by making everything spelled one way. For example, the Yakama tribe uses 'Yakama' for their government, but 'Yakima' for the language (with some debate within the community). Likewise, the term 'Coquille' is pronounced differently depending on whether it referes to the tribe (/ko:kwél/) or the town of Coquille, OR (/ko:kíl/), which was named after the people. Suomichris ( talk) 19:08, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
Interesting. I think it's best if the article at least mentions the Chinuk Wawa spelling. Alexwoods ( talk) 19:55, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
The supposed difference between pidgin and creole versions of this language are specious and scholarly abstractions. There are certainly dialectical and communal differences in the various ways Chinūkwawa was and is spoken. A gradation of usage within and without native communities is to be assumed as in any language, mother tongue or not, lingua franca or not. But to characterize the long standing name for the language as Chinuk Wawa as "racist" is beyond extreme NPOV, ignoring the historicity of the term as well as its current predominance. The name used in both the native tongue and English has been Chinuk Wawa, according to GR spelling, and most contemporary speakers call it that. The name Chinook Jargon is an historical term on the balance, and one laden with unsavoury connotations based in colonialism of the language being a "mere patois" of the "savages". As such, it is understandable that many modern speakers, both native and otherwise, regard "Chinook Jargon" as a deprecated usage. Regardless, outside of historical contexts, most current users users call this language Chinuk Wawa in English, as the name has long been in the language itself. The wiki should reflect this. I support the main name of this article being changed to the standard current term, Chinuk Wawa, with Chinook Jargon rendered as a redirect and alias. 曙䬠 - Sant'owax Q'ulsnas ( talk) 02:35, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
When researching Chin Gee Hee I remember running across an anecdote about a Chinese man who was in court in Seattle in the 1880s, accused of being a recent, illegal immigrant. The judge addressed him in Chinook Jargon; he answered in Chinook Jargon; case dismissed. But it had nothing to do with what I was working on at the time, and I didn't write down a citation. Is someone familiar with the incident, and does someone have a citation? Certainly seems worth a mention by way of showing some of how the language at one time characterized a region. - Jmabel | Talk 20:52, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
Ah, found it. Not in Murray Morgan, rather in Native Seattle by Coll Thrush, pp 64-65. It was in Seattle, in the 1870s. A Chinese man named Ling Fu was brought before Judge Cornelius Hanford in Seattle's courthouse, accused of not having the proper citizenship papers. He faced deportation, but argued that he did not need to carry papers because he was born on Puget Sound. The judge then said, Ikta mika nem? Consee cole mika? To which Ling replied, Nika nem Ling Fu, pe nika mox tahtlum pee quinum cole. The judge was surprised and said, "You are an American, sure, and you can stay here." Then, to the bailiff, "Ling Fu is dismissed." Oh, and hey, I see the book is on Google Books, with preview. Try Native Seattle, p 64.
So, does this little tale warrant adding somewhere? If so, where? Pfly ( talk) 09:08, 5 November 2010 (UTC)
I removed the two sentences citing Duane Pasco, including:
"...cites a dialogue "between a Chinaman and a Swede" that, he says, was some of the best-spoken Jargon, i.e. the most idiomatic and most articulate, he'd ever heard." (cite here to http://tenaswawa.home.att.net/)
The misquote above is apparently a confabulation of:
"The jargon served as a means of discourse between those individuals whose language base was uncommon. A Makah of Neah Bay might converse with an Englishman, Frenchman, Chinese, S’Klallam, Tsimshian or Nisqually using Chinook Jargon. ... an Englishman and a Frenchman [not sharing a mutual language] might find this an appropriate form of verbal intercourse." See A note regarding the Jargon dialog and English translations in "Moola John."
The word "Chinaman" appears nowhere on the cited Web site.
In regard to the quotation I removed, Mr. Pasco reports "I can say unequivocally that any of what he's saying is most certainly no quote of mine." Jeffreykopp ( talk) 07:45, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
In Vol 3 Issue #1 of TENAS WAWA Mr. Pasco has a copy of a letter sent to him by one of his assistants in a polyglot mixture of 8 seperate languages. He says in the introduction, "....Back to my co-worker...He spoke Norweigan and some Spanish. He would ask me to say this or that thing in Cantonese, Japanese, various Indian tongues or Chinook Jargon". Could this be what you are referring to? PASIOOKS 173.126.17.248 ( talk) 20:36, 17 October 2009 (UTC)
Chinook Jargon use by English-language speakers was split off from this article unilaterally and was a POV fork; it's also wrong in presuming that only "English-language speakers" were the only other kind of non-indigenous users. Also some linguists/academics maintain that Chinook was a continuum, and its use by "English-language speakers" (and German-language speakers, and Chinese-language speakers, and Hawaiian-language speakers, and Cree-language speakers, and Iroquoian-language speakers) are just as legitimately Chinook Jargon as any form spoken by native peoples. This article (and the other one) needs major trimming of the long word list; but doing so is not helped by "segregating" non-indigenous usages to another page, a mistitlted and a-contextual page to boot. Skookum1 ( talk) 14:45, 2 November 2008 (UTC)
I looked up IP Address 71.217.35.194, who placed the series of fact templates at apparently random through one of the text sections....while I grant some of hte langauge in there has a POV flavour, it's interseting that a number of the items challenged are supported by Jim Holton's book, which was just removed from the external links/further reading, e.g. the creolization at Grand Ronde with Klickitat etc. I even found in various writings (not frmo the chinookology community though) a number of references to how the indigenous-language scholarship community and also band elderes/opliticians have been hostile to the study of CJ because of the threat it represented/s to oldder-language survival, and also because of its role in residential schols and in evangelization. So it's all citable, though the published academics are more concerned with "proving" that hte native phonology is consistent/pervasive and that non-native speakere weren't really CJ speakers etc; much of this built on speculations expanded out of observations made only in teh core Columbai River area, or by extrapoliting hoped-for existence of the sxupposed prot-Jargon. What I'm geting at is that while a lot of the published, and therefore citable material, is highly speculative and subjective in autre but can be cited, much other discussion is hidden in the listserve for CHINOOK (so not citable) or is tucked away in studies on other subjects and other languages. So fine, there's a lot that ne4eds citation here; but it doesn't need half-a-dozen interpolary section-citation templates....anyway I traced the IP address, evidently someone from chinookology inc. who wants to remain nameless (how typical, how very typical), but who might turn up in CHINOOK-L by x-ref'ing Denver CO and maybe *.edu domains in that city/area.....the "Indianization" thing is all too citable, if I could only cite any one of twenty things that Tony has said in conference or in private or by phone; it was in fact a brag of the Grand Ronde revivalists that they had purged the old CJ of English words and replaced them with imports from other native languaegs in order to make it "more Indian". And I'm sure this is even in Holton's book.....though like the back-pedalling about Chiense and Scandinavians (see above) it wouldn't surprse me to find out that he, too, had backpedalled to cover up the very evident prejudices in current academic chinookology; certainly their paranoias are on full display, as in the section above. My end run around this citation challenge, of course, is to finally write that book about my experiences with the online CJ revival an the various illogics and suspect behaviorus/blacklisting I experienced in order for them "to protect the truth" ..... as if they had a monopoly on that, which they don't, especially when there are various truths they refuse to examine..... Skookum1 ( talk) 02:58, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
Just a curiosity more than anything, but I think Kumtux Leelo is a name also found on the Computer Game Star Wars racer (Pod Racers) and as I recall he has wolf - like features. It may have been taken from a Star Wars movie. Does anyone know if this is just a coincidence or can anyone confirm this in the Star wars Racer game? Dees anyone know if this is common that they revert to old languages in film production when looking for words or names that may sound alien? I found this interesting when I came across Kumtux, and I remembered that leelo or leelu is wolf! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Markosjal ( talk • contribs) 09:31, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
I guess I never realized how much of this language I learned growing up in Portland. It would sadden me greatly to see it die. We must preserve every identifiable word. Even in Mexico A man claiming to be from Virginia said "Skookum" to me. I knew exactly what he meant, but I also knew that it was Wawa , and that it was highly improbable that he was from Virginia as he had previously told me. That led us to a discussion of Wawa, which he was unfamiliar with. I found out I was right, he was originally from British Columbia! I post this here because I do not know how to post it in support of my change on the page. http://books.google.com.mx/books?id=Oy8_5S8hMjAC&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=indian+name+rooster+rock+state+park&source=bl&ots=7W1KANtnzT&sig=k6XRYgZ7ZtAlouUs6EYAj59NfjY&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result#PPA102,M1 See bottom of page 102 This supports what I heard as a child, and I do not believe this to be disputable.; —Preceding unsigned comment added by Markosjal ( talk • contribs) 23:26, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
Markosjal ( talk) 17:59, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
==re {{ WikiProject Glossaries}}
== For a while now this page's lengthy glossary has needed trimming, and/or moving to a separate article. Many of the words listed, even obscure ones, are used in regional English, albeit in specialist contexts - e.g. the equestrian terms, or mowitch and moolack by hunters. So maybe List of Chinook Jargon words used in English is one solution; and to this day I think the creation of the "use by English language speakers" was a POV fork, or at best mis-titled as not only English speakers among non-aboriginals used this (and "English-language speakers" includes native people whose primary language is English); the real meaning of that POV fork was "use of CJ by non-native speakers", with "white" implicit (as it's often overlooked that the Hawaiians and the Chinese and otehr non-white, non-native people in the PacNW also spoke CJ, if not according to the strictures of its re-codification by Grand Ronde-based linguistis/linguistic agendas. Mostly on this occasion I'm here to comment on WikiProject Glossaries, which may provide a solution for how to deal with the word-list that's bulking out this article too much; I didn't add it to this page because this page isn't a list/glossary, though it does contain one.... Skookum1 ( talk) 18:38, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
I've removed the bit about Iona Campagnolo, who is no longer Lieutenant Governor and more importantly does NOT as far as I can tell speak CJ. If anyone has evidence that she does, please supply it. I suspect that this claim is based on the fact that when she was installed as Lieutenant Governor she spoke one sentence in CJ. However, that sentence was taken from Lillard and Glavin's book on CJ and is not evidence that can actually use CJ. See: http://thetyee.ca/Life/2006/01/10/StillSpeakChinook/. Bill ( talk) 02:25, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
I've made a proposal for a Chinuk wawa Wikipedia over on Meta. Owen ( talk) 19:32, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
Re this:
It's definitely old-fashioned, and as noted in the subsequent in-line comment, there's a passage in Bushby's journals from Begbie's visit to Lillooet, or what became Lillooet, in 1858 or '59, though there the spelling is "Waw-waw" and the phrasing is "we had a Waw-waw with them". I'm from that area as well as from the Lower Mainland, and have heard several people use it, mostly older or "of a certain background" (rural). It may not be how Jargon loan-words were used in Washington or Oregon, but it definitely was in BC; I'll see if I can find a copy of Bushby to at least cite that and put it in historical, if not current, context. Part of the problem here is that this falls into the purview of the POV-fork article " Chinook Jargon use by English-language speakers", which someone split off (wrongly) a long time ago and which hasn't been "healed"...I'll also consult Terry Glavin, co-author of A Voice Great Within Us to see if it's either in that book or if he knows of any other cites for it.....the further bit, not quoted here, about "lelang" meaning "the tongue" directly, and not just language, is in Harper, Shaw, Gibbs, El Comancho and I'm surprised a citation request was added for that..... Skookum1 ( talk) 00:26, 27 March 2010 (UTC)
I have read in this discussion that there is no right pronunciation, but could there be a more-conservative pronunciation or a more-English pronunciation just as an example? Even some details on the wrong pronunciation might do it. A detailed range of pronunciation variants would be useful and interesting. I'd like to know more about this speech, but as someone with a non-English name, i know better than most folks that pronunciation is not based on spelling, excepting some acronyms. Speaking of spelling, how consistent is the spelling? Are there silent letters? Is there a difference between <c> and <k>? Is <gh> one consonant or two? And so forth. -- Leif Runenritzer ( talk) 06:34, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
User:Huon has started an AfD to get rid of the Skookum article; where the mentions of the Skookum doll and Skookum (cat) went and other citations that were on it went, I don't know, but now there's only the Skookum Tools ref left......which to me is emblematic and representative of the persaviness of the word and concept in modern local usage, and because its information on the meaning of the word is one of the only pages out there that's usable as a cite; the argument that that's not a linguistics cite is totally spurious; this isn't a a language article. On pages about CJ usage by natives, yes, there are further definitions; but this is about non-native use and the presence of this word in NW culture/identity. If only populist usages are there to be cited, it's a form of academic exclusionism.....though there is a Barbara Harris essay on the word out there somewhere, about its adoption into local English and so on....but instead of do some research and improve and cite the article, the deletionist agenda has seen nothing better to do than to try to get rid of it..... Skookum1 ( talk) 02:56, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
I grow wear of the need to patrol this page for biases of the core-bias group, and given my health and age know it's time for me to let go. That the POV fork to Chinook Jargon as used by English speakers has been allowed to stand and nobody else has questioned it says a lot to me of the inherent biases of most others around here, and the paucity of publications in the field that are independent of the biases circulated by the modern/GR group mean it's pointless in Wikipedia guideline/RS terms to try to hold forth here on all the things that are wrong with the premises here and in the sources. That I never published in the field, or had the funding support to proceed with much-needed sourcing or extensive archives around BC that have gone ignored, speaks to the biases of the field and those who have made it into their own image. Time for me to hang it up, anything I'd publish would be critiqued as "he's white anyway" so why bother? one snotty edit comment from a newbie using GR spelling in his user name was enough to tick me off and...well. I'm done. Have the playpen to youselves all you want now. I'll try not to look and learn not to care. Skookum1 ( talk) 06:43, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
Does anyone have any sources on these? Specifically, I'm wondering about Robert Service. I know he used the term cheechako (chxi-chaku), but I can't find any info on him actually knowing the language. It's of particular interest to me as he's a relative of mine. Also, on an unrelated note, should this section just be called "Notable Speakers of Chinook Jargon"? The page definitely has a white focus and I think it would be good to bring in notable Indians as well (Mungo Martin, Eula Petite, Frances Johnson, Charles Depoe etc etc).pʼiɬiɬskin 22:27, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
This term was alleged to have been "not a word", but it is in use and was first heard by me from the late (?) Barbara Harris during our encounters in the early days of the "online Jargon revival"..... it has also been used, I believe, by Terry Glavin, who was co-author with Charles Lillard of A Voice Great Within Us. Formation of words by adding -ology is not illegal in English. Skookum1 ( talk) 06:18, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
It started off as a pidgin (not a full-fledged language) but eventually creolized (became full fledged). I hope the current version of the article is clearer. — kwami ( talk) 01:14, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 3 external links on Chinook Jargon. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 09:18, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 4 external links on Chinook Jargon. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
{{
dead link}}
tag to
http://vancouver.ca/publicart_wac/publicart.exe/indiv_artwork?pnRegistry_No=213{{
dead link}}
tag to
http://archon.archives.pdx.edu/index.php?p=collections%2Fcontrolcard&id=52&q=chinookWhen you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 06:19, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
Title. the table is ugly, it's overly defined with English pronunciations, sorted alphabetically and not by place of articulation, and inconsisttent with Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Omoutuazn ( talk • contribs) 02:48, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
I added some references as requested in the section for words used by English-language speakers, especially the controversial Siwash. Hopefully for the better. Fimbriata ( talk) 20:00, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
This article doesn’t give any information about the language! I came across Chinook in an article about the evolution of French. The author Raymond Queneau observed that in the previous 50 years, the syntax of spoken French had altered radically and he claimed that this form of the language, which he termed néo-français or troisième français, resembled Chinook. A typical sentence consisted of a list of substantives followed by a “skeleton” sentence with pronouns replacing the substantives. Example ‘’Le gendarme, le voleur il l’a attrapé’’ ("The policeman, the thief, he caught him” for "The policeman caught the thief"). The phenomenon, which I have observed myself, doesn't happen in English nor as far as I can see in other European languages. See https://www.grin.com/document/323136 for details. I would have liked to see if this is indeed also the case with Chinook.
Franciscus montmartinensis ( talk) 16:43, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
@ SMcCandlish Recently, I changed the number of "native speakers" listed in the language infobox from "More than 640 (at least 3 native adult speakers alive in 2019 based on estimates from the Chinook Jargon Listserv archives)" to "1". Shortly afterwards, you removed the listing of just one native speaker saying "Claiming there is exactly one speaker is also unsourced speaker information, and almost certainly wrong."
I was surprised by this because I thought the source that I had provided a source, specifically the
Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online (APICS), through the template's ref
parameter. Additionally, I think there is an important distinction to be made between native speakers and speakers who have learned the Chinook Jargon as a second language.
Sources, including the APICS one I mentioned earlier do point towards there being a second language community for Chinook Jargon. Specifically, the APICS source suggests "maybe 1000 people with L2 knowledge (via oral or written means)" and the self-report 2009-2013 American Community Survey currently cited in the article estimated 20-70 people spoke Chinook Jargon at home in the United States. As to there being precisely 1 native speaker living, a situation where the exact number of native living speakers is known isn't uncommon for endangered Native American languages, compare the Upper Chinook language where the number of remaining native speakers was precisely tracked and known over time as they died.
If there are some additional details about my initial edit which explain why it was partially undone, I would be interested in learning about those. Thanks and take care. — The Editor's Apprentice ( talk) 19:53, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
|ref=
parameter has output that is specifically attached to the output of the |speakers=
parameter (which is frankly pretty weird infobox coding), or that |speakers=
outputs a specifically "native" speakers claim (which is confusing since the parameter doesn't match its rendered name, and probably not helpful anyway, since I doubt our readers care much about number of people who knew a language since childhood versus number of people who actually know a language, and at any rate our readers probably care much more about the latter). Since Chinook Jargon is a trade pidgin or creole, it seems dubious that it is the first language of anyone at all, even if there remains a speaker who has known it since they were little as a second language learned alongside their first. The entire notion of "native speaker" in a case like this is kind of dubious, and the infobox presently suggesting that there is only 1 speaker is misleading, and would basically mean that this is a dead language (a language you can't speak or write intelligibly with anyone else in the world is already dead for all intents and purposes). Anyway, at very least the second-language learning material you mention from APICS and ACS is probably worth adding to the article. But the infobox also supports |speakers2=
to add information on total speakers, or another option is using |speakers_label=
to remove "native" from the output of |speakers=
and use a larger number there. I think we should do something to make it clearer to a reader of the infobox that there is not just one speaker left. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
22:10, 22 October 2023 (UTC)This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Chinook Jargon article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
![]() | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | The contents of the Chinook Jargon use by English-language speakers page were merged into Chinook Jargon on November 18, 2011. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page. |
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 10 September 2021 and 31 December 2021. Further details are available
on the course page. Student editor(s):
Kathleen.stone.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 19:01, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 11 September 2018 and 31 December 2018. Further details are available
on the course page. Student editor(s):
Kiahwwwl.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 17:33, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
Recusing myself from quality assessment; but article does need revision/expansion; eventually separate article on the Grand Ronde Wawa currently spoken in OR, which differs from the "traditional" or standard historical Jargon(s). ---- Skookum1 (6 May 06)
"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."
See also more recent Talk:Chinook Jargon#Chinuk Wawa vs. Chinook Jargon revisited
Swingbeaver 10h03, 20 August 2005 (GMT-5h00) says:
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 (until Iona Campgnolo and Rita Johnston, respetively); 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)
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)
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)
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)
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. Ga rr ie 05:27, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
Lewis and Clark were greeted in recognizable Chinook WaWa as documented by their own journal. This is a pretty good indication that the language was in use prior to extensive contact with cheechakos. Certainly in early contact times it went through a major evolution as witnessed by the number of European loan words -- which possibly displaced some harder to pronounce native words. However, in pre-contact times, all the tribes in the Northwest had their own language and yet there was extensive trade and intermarriage between them, so a shared language would have been a logical development. The Chinook tribe in particular was noted for their extensive trading expeditions. I have heard two different stories from two different elders which indicate that Chinooks went as far south as Mexico on their pre-contact trading journeys. Another indication of prior use is that an elder from the Lummi tribe (near Canadian border) told me a traditional story about an event that occurred in pre-contact times and taught me the song to go with it, the song is in Chinook WaWa. It's possible that the song was composed later, but it's just as likely that the song was composed in pre-contact times. Just because we did not keep written records does not mean that something did not occur. It would be interesting to look for place names and other indications of cj use in California and Mexico. It is not helpful to be so cavalier in dismissal of Indian Oral Traditions.
Manyshoes (
talk)
20:24, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
I suspect that "great variety" refers to the number of different source languages. Manyshoes ( talk) 20:24, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
See List of Chinook Jargon placenames, also Talk:List of Chinook Jargon placenames Skookum1 19:10, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
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"
Well, we know that french and english were part of chinook jargon, but what about the native languages that made the vast majority of the vocabulary? Lashootseed is one, Can we get a list going for the definition?
As it stands in the article now, this is the definition: kamuks or comox — dog. This would have originally referred to a now-extinct species of domestic dog once common in the region, which was raised for its wool and meat. This breed is often depicted in drawings and paintings from the earliest eras.
This seems to be vandalism to me, but I don't know the subject area well enough to be sure. Can somebody who does know confirm or deny this?
At the very end of the article, just in front of the categories is the following text which is commented out so it does not display (see below). Should it be included anywhere, or expunged? j-beda 13:23, 4 July 2007 (UTC)
In British Columbia, Yukon and throughout the Pacific Northwest a pidgin language known as the Chinook Jargon emerged in the early 19th Century which was a combination of Chinookan, Nootka, Chehalis, French and English, with a smattering of words from other languages including Iroquoian and Hawaiian thrown in. The Jargon had no fixed form, and — depending on the origin of the speakers and the locality — words from other languages were also incorporated: In the Puget Sound area of Washington, one account describes the adoption of the Norwegian/Scandinavian words glemde ("forgot") and husker ("remember"); in the writings of guide-outfitter Ted "Chilco" Choate, of Gaspard Lake in the Chilcotin Country, comments that Gaelic as well as Chilcotin were components of Jargon usage in that region, but does not provide any examples.
Chinook, as the Jargon is usually known, is normally considered an aboriginal language, but it was in its day the lingua franca of the Northwest Coast and Plateau and was often the language of workplace and home even in non-native environments. It was, in other words, a language of all peoples in the BC and the Pacific Northwest and was not exclusively native. So much so that during the colonial period of the 1860s a proposal to make it an official language was half-tabled in the colonial Legislative Assembly but was not passed, and in 1903 Richard McBride was recruited to run for the first-ever BC Conservative leadership in Chinook, so as to thwart eavesdropping by "Canadians", as people from Eastern Canada were still known at that time. Court proceedings involving natives were often in Chinook, and while court translators for Chinook were present, typically justices, magistrates and government agents themselves spoke passable Chinook.
On the other hand, efforts by the Diocese of Kamloops to separate their Catholic First Nations flock from the largely Protestant cultus whitemans (cultus means "bad, worthless, useless, ordinary") produced a separate script based on the French Duployan shorthand and a large amount of ecclesiastical translations as well as community bulletins of the diocese in a short-lived publication named the Kamloops Wawa ("talk from Kamloops"), and sermons were regularly delivered in Chinook at native churches throughout BC, even into the 1960s.
A darker side of the Jargon's role in native life is connected to the residential school systems, where the speaking of native languages was forbidden and rewarded with beatings. Despite this threat, First Nations children from all the cultures speaking the many different traditional languages in the province found they shared a common tongue in the Chinook, and it became the secret language of the schools - and punishable for being used, although only a few years before the churches running the schools had themselves used the Jargon in teaching and evangelical activities. Despite the Jargon being forbidden, its secretive use in the schools furthered its spread in the BC-wide native community as those children returned to their communities, often not knowing any of their traditional language and unable to communicate with parents and elders. The circumstances of Jargon usage in the schools also created a feeling among natives that it was their language, and as at the same time massive immigration to BC obliterated the old Jargon-speaking non-native culture, such that a linguistic divide was created where many non-natives speaking the Jargon or using Jargon words did not even know it was native in origin, and natives themselves preferred not to share it with outsiders because of its function as an intertribal language. By the mid-20th Century, Chinook was the dominant language among elders in most native communities and was a threat to the traditional languages. Because of this, the movement to restore the traditional languages has largely suppressed Chinook materials and, while many young natives can understand some of the Chinook, it has largely passed out of use.
Its widespread usage in the region left its impact on regional English, which still uses many Chinook words ( skookum, saltchuck, tyee). Also notable are "Chinookisms", which range from borrowings such as "in the sticks" to a certain style of English delivery with simplified grammar. The evolution of slang terms such as "dumb-ass" may come from the Chinook hyas (big, important; found in English as "high-ass"), tenas (small, a child), tamanass (magic, spirits).
It was my understanding speakers of the Chinook Jargon (and I think this name is the only appropriate one at this point) in the Kanaka village next to Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River on the Washington side were the first to raise a generation of native speakers, which by many definitions is the criterion for definition as a language rather than a pidgin. The question of creole is a different question from what I gather. The story goes the Hudson Bay Company officials back east in Canada (Britain claimed the territory down to the Columbia River) grew alarmed at the prospect of a heathen population arising with a unified speech or at least didn't want the corporation's name tarnished, and sent out missionaries to teach the native speakers English and Christianity. Kanaka means Hawaiian of course; there were Hawaiian canoe crews brought in from the then Sandwich Islands to help navigate the waterways of Pacific America for the fur trade. It's interesting to note, for me at least, competing visions on the American side regarding the push westward. Jefferson had envisioned new states, read national entities or countries, emerging to the west of the United States, bound by a common origin and language in fraternal ties with the mother country in the east, while Astor largely engineered what came to be known as manifest destiny by establishing American outposts, including Astoria on the Columbia. As it turned out, race decided the territorial dispute over what came to be known as the Washington territory, the southern stretches of the Columbia territory bordering Oregon: George Washington Bush, a black (or East Indian) homesteader, was denied entry into Oregon territory because of the racist laws there and set up house across the river in Tumwater, taking a native woman as wife. It was also my understanding that Tumwater is named after Tum-tum, a native and perhaps Chinook Jargon word meaning waters, because of an abundance of natural fresh water springs in the area. "Tumwater" is thus a bilingual reduplication. Does it belong on the list of Jargon place names? My cursory knowledge of Washington state and Pacific Northwest native languages says that some were/are not Lushootseed or even Salishan at all but were probably present before the Salishan invasion from the Alberta Plateau about AD 1000, IIRC. The languages in coastal British Columbia are even more varied. From what I gather non-Salishan languages contributed to the Chinook Jargon as much as Salishan languages did. I don't really see the need to call the pre-European trading language a proto-pidgin unless pidgin is defined as the natives' attempt to speak the conquerors' European language. It seems to have been fully-fledged before the arrival of Europeans and was quite capable of assimilating European elements. That said, it's great to see this on wikipedia, and it's amazing to learn that there are still speakers beyond the unrecognized (by the BIA) Chinook tribe on the Columbia up in British Columbia. It would be helpful to have a graphic or two illustrating the Duployan shorthand orthography mentioned. International phonetics in brackets after the words on the word and place name lists would also be helpful, and also a more direct link to on-line versions of essential works (Franz Boas?) on the Jargon (which isn't a jargon at all but rather a language as described above, but which should retain its historic name because of reference, primacy in naming conventions etc. "The language known as the Chinook Jargon.")
The business about "American leaders" (above) is more or less true from what I remember reading, government officials translated English into Chinook Jargon at treaty-signing gatherings and in various dealings with the native tribes. Prominent early American figures in the territory also knew the Jargon.
I can't resist an excerpt from a native Washingtonian, born in Olympia, whose family founded Oysterville along the Columbia River and whose poem contains a number of Chinook Jargon place names. It shows a certain feeling for native words and vital cross-pollination with English into the 20th century:
Chet loved to WALLA WALLA/
In breakers warm and wet/
In all DUWAMISH water/
Would splash and WOLLOCHET.
And was he brave?/
WENATCHEE!/
And also ELOCHOMAN/
‘Til LATAH he fell in with/
A LILLIWAUP named Anne.
ALLALLA PALOUSE was Annie/
‘Lor LUMMI, wasn’t she though?/
She had ASOTIN something/
That should have laid CHETLO.
She saw him in DEWATTO,/
Afloatin’ on his back,/
With TATOOSH on his TUMTUM/
That made her lips go smack!
Now WHATCOM over Annie?/
‘Twas love ATTALIA that,/
Her heart went HAMMA HAMMA,/
Her teeth went KLICKITAT!
She said, "You are MALOTT dear;/
WYNOOCHEE kiss me pet?"/
The MATTAWA her ardor,/
Was not returned by Chet.
So ANACORTES Chester,/
She has to HAVERMALE,/
But he replies, "TONASKET!/
OHOP off. Hit the trail!"
"NASELLE me your embraces,"/
She begs him with sweet moan./
"My family’s ALGONA/
And I must sleep alone."
With METHOW in her madness,/
Once more the girl began./
"I SEKIU, and you only . . ./
ALAVA you!" SPOKANE.
excerpt from "Omak Me Yours Tonight, or, Ilwaco Million Miles for One of Your Smiles: A ballard of Washington State," copyright 1972 Willard Richardson Espy (1910-1999)
Hypatea 14:34, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
Yes, Skookum, I was wrong about Tumwater. That's something locals told me, that the place used to be called Tum-Tum, don't know exactly. For some reason I pictured Grand Ronde in BC although the article(s) say clearly it's in Oregon. Nowhere did it say the Jargon was Salishan-based either, I don't know why I thought it was important to point out it wasn't, except that it is interesting or might be interesting in the article to mention the Wakashan, Salishan and Penutian (which includes Mayan, Chinook proper, Araucanian and others) families and their affiliations. Vi Hilbert, the Lushootseed scholar, mentions the non-Salish groups in western Washington. IIRC the Puyallup had something to suggest a non-Salish linguistic substrate.
Regarding Bush and competing claims to the territory, it was my understanding that the "green line" ran roughly somewhere between the Nisqually Delta (Ft. Nisqually) and Steilacoom (Ft. Steilacoom) for a time, George Bush occupying the southlands for the USA, although the present forts were built later. Interesting to note in the entry Oregon boundary dispute tha the phrases "54' 40" or fight!" and "manifest destiny" both came out of the dispute.
Franz Boas only recorded a few things in Chinook Jargon it seems. The links to the Jargon dictionaries in the entry are very good. The "Mystery Dictionary" on the AT&T page looks to be verbatim with Costello's list in The Siwash (1895) may be from the Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon printed in Olympia in 1873 mentioned by Shaw. The place names seem to center around Olympia and Union City (now just Union, WA; the city must have never developed as expected). The Washington State Library in Olympia or the Smithsonian might have a copy of the dictionary mentioned by Shaw so this could be checked.
For whatever reason, HBC apparently saw fit to break up the emerging scene at the Kanaka village.
Point taken on international phonetics; do recordings (Smithsonian or elsewhere) exist of "native" Jargon speakers? A link on the page to something like that would be very good. Lushootseed phonetics are very different to English and other European languages. From what I understand the double T in Seattle merely represents an attempt to render the closest thing English has to a glottal stop, while the L in Seattle is an entirely different sound in Lushootseed. I believe Vi Hilbert renders this L-ish sound as l with a ~ through it. I'd be interested to know if there were any Hoh/Quileute contributions to the Chinook Jargon and more about the Spanish, which is mentioned by some but not others. The BC writer Anne Cameron, who can't always be trusted to transmit native lore correctly, I hear, mentions oral traditions concerning the arrival of the Spanish ships somewhere on or near Vancouver Island. The Olympic Peninsula was also claimed and named by the Spanish. Russians were also involved in the fur trade, sailing down to the Russian River in California, but there seems to be no Russian in the Jargon. Interesting why not.
Hypatea 15:29, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
In reading over teh recent rewrite I found it necdessary to start placing cite templates, because a lot has been added that's entirely speculative and also really about the "proto-Jargon", which isn't the same thing any more than the Grand Ronde Chinuk Wawa is the same thing; despite certain academics' agendas that they're all the same, THEY'RE NOT. The downplaying of teh white role in teh actual Chinook Jargon (i.e. the one shared with non-native cultures) is clearly on display in the recent edits, as is the commentying out of the entire orioginal content of this article, which amounts to a deletion; add to Wikipedia.....thte claims that there were Asian and Hawaiians words are spurious - unless tyee is really Chiinese tai and thre's omething else than kanaka out there from "Polynesian". BC and AK area dialeccts of CJ are mentioned as having Russian and Gaelic, and Pasco says there were Norwegian/Swedish words in Puget Sound....but funny how the professional Chinookologists just aren't interested in that, but more in proving that white people weren't capable of speaking it and it's not really their langauge etc etc etc. The POV template can come off when t6he p.c.-massage is taken out ("anything p.c. is inherently POV") and also when the ingrate who commented out the original article integrates thte material back in, instead of tries to hide it in the dustbin. This kind of behaviour is eventaully going to show up at a linguistics/history conference about the puerile and destruction behaviour of Chinookological "experts" who don't want to discuss things, rather censure adn ban them. Disappointing; I would have thought you guys had grown up by now. Skookum1 ( talk) 14:30, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
I don't know what has transpired previously on these pages, I have only recently joined this discussion and I am not about to wade into the middle of an argument. But with regard to Hawaiian/Polynesian words finding their way into the language that is entirely possible. What few people outside of the Chinook tribe seem to be aware of is that in pre-contact times there were multiple incidents of visits from ocean-going Polynesians. And in at least one case a shipwreck resulting in the survivors becoming permanent residents. This is what our oral traditions tell us.
Manyshoes (
talk)
22:15, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
I have also heard an account of a shipwreck that was probably Chinese in origin. The bottom of the ship was lined with sheets of copper - presumably to prevent barnacles. The copper was striped from the ship and highly valued. I do not know if any of the Chinese survived, but clearly there have been a lot of different peoples coming to these shores even in pre-contact times. I also remember about 10 or 15 years ago there was a Japanese fishing boat with a broken engine that managed to drift all the way to (California?) So clearly, ocean crossings are possible, and they have been happening for a long time. Polynesian artifacts have also been found in the San Juan Islands. Manyshoes ( talk) 03:01, 19 February 2010 (UTC)
The former is theoretical, althoug I've found in Costello's 1909 publication the idea that a predecessor jargon existed was out there even back then; the Proto-Jargon shoudl be a separate article, and efforts by certain academic agendas to equivocate the two are citable only because they've theorized about it; but a theory isn't a fact....rather than add another cite template, here's the wordiing that's bothering me, although there are similar obfuscations elsewhere in the article:
Better worded as "The Proto-Jargon".....the historical meaning of Chinook Jargon is clearly that form which integrated English, French and other non-PacNW languages, and is not a reference to the Proto-Jargon, which clearly is a different beastie, as also the modern form in GR (which doesnt' even have a common vocabulary with the Warm Springs variant, much less any a priori "correctness" over forms found farther north; or superior to Chinook Jargon use by English-language speakers, which is mis-titled anyway as Germans, Scandinavians, Chinese, French etc and others used it as well.....but who as speakers get derided by indigenously-biased linguists as "incapable ofpronouncing it properly"...pretty funny considering the mangling of English and French borrowings (but boy would "we" ever get nailed for saying natives were "incapable"), and totally untrue given the phonological palette of the Gaelic and Germanic and other European peoples present in the region. Skookum1 ( talk) 18:50, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
As per the remaining fact template re "indianized" GR chinuk-wawa, as noted taht was Tony Johnson's own term; another used by the mascot-linguists is "creolized", and refers to the induction of newer native words adn the getting-rid-of non-aboriginal words (mostly the English ones, FRrench ones are for some reason OK). And also "more Indianized" pronunciation. I'm surprised Holton didn't include this in his book because it was the subject of long discussions at one of the Chinuk Lu?lu's and a bit of a bragging point by GR indigenous people who were proud of it. There are cites available within CHINOOK-L, if that's a suitable citation to use; would take some digging, but more likely it should be in materials published by GR and whatsisname, the linguist who works with them. D. Robertson, if you're reading this you know exactly what I'm talking about. Any progress on finding actual CJ usage in different parts of BC, or are you still trying to integrate everything frrom a GR perspective? Warm Springs, Colville etc. remain undocumented forms; and any number of BC peoples have tapes of CJ users kept under lock-and-key to prevent their being studied; non-aboriginal source informants die off because of disinterest/disregard by academics because they're not aboriginal.....ethnic myopia is the curse of CJ/PacNW historical studies IMO. Skookum1 ( talk) 18:59, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
that got built before I and others contributing at the time knew about content parameters; should it be migrated to the CJ Wiki, or into Wiktionary, or where? Some should remain because of their continuing use today (mowitch, e.g.); the idea was to give a demonstration of the fluidity of meanings; as there can be no "proper pronunciation" despite GR-biased academics' inclination to claim that theirs is teh "right one". Skookum1 ( talk) 18:52, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm starting a new threat on this since the one below is a bit messy.
In my understanding, Chinook Jargon refers to the pidgin spoken around the Northwest. Chinuk Wawa, on the other hand, is the name of the creolized version of said pidgin spoke at Grand Ronde, OR. Despite claims below that the spelling 'Chinuk' is used to 'de-whitify' the language (which is a largely incoherent statement anyway; the Chinook peoples still use that spelling for their ethnic identity), the speakers and community members at Grand Ronde prefer the term (and spelling) 'Chinuk Wawa' for their language.
I think it can remain Chinook Jargon throughout the rest of the page, but in the section where it mentions how it is called by those at Grand Ronde, it should remain 'Chinuk Wawa'.
This issue of spelling and pronounciation is not uncommon in the Northwest, and should simply be glossed over by making everything spelled one way. For example, the Yakama tribe uses 'Yakama' for their government, but 'Yakima' for the language (with some debate within the community). Likewise, the term 'Coquille' is pronounced differently depending on whether it referes to the tribe (/ko:kwél/) or the town of Coquille, OR (/ko:kíl/), which was named after the people. Suomichris ( talk) 19:08, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
Interesting. I think it's best if the article at least mentions the Chinuk Wawa spelling. Alexwoods ( talk) 19:55, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
The supposed difference between pidgin and creole versions of this language are specious and scholarly abstractions. There are certainly dialectical and communal differences in the various ways Chinūkwawa was and is spoken. A gradation of usage within and without native communities is to be assumed as in any language, mother tongue or not, lingua franca or not. But to characterize the long standing name for the language as Chinuk Wawa as "racist" is beyond extreme NPOV, ignoring the historicity of the term as well as its current predominance. The name used in both the native tongue and English has been Chinuk Wawa, according to GR spelling, and most contemporary speakers call it that. The name Chinook Jargon is an historical term on the balance, and one laden with unsavoury connotations based in colonialism of the language being a "mere patois" of the "savages". As such, it is understandable that many modern speakers, both native and otherwise, regard "Chinook Jargon" as a deprecated usage. Regardless, outside of historical contexts, most current users users call this language Chinuk Wawa in English, as the name has long been in the language itself. The wiki should reflect this. I support the main name of this article being changed to the standard current term, Chinuk Wawa, with Chinook Jargon rendered as a redirect and alias. 曙䬠 - Sant'owax Q'ulsnas ( talk) 02:35, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
When researching Chin Gee Hee I remember running across an anecdote about a Chinese man who was in court in Seattle in the 1880s, accused of being a recent, illegal immigrant. The judge addressed him in Chinook Jargon; he answered in Chinook Jargon; case dismissed. But it had nothing to do with what I was working on at the time, and I didn't write down a citation. Is someone familiar with the incident, and does someone have a citation? Certainly seems worth a mention by way of showing some of how the language at one time characterized a region. - Jmabel | Talk 20:52, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
Ah, found it. Not in Murray Morgan, rather in Native Seattle by Coll Thrush, pp 64-65. It was in Seattle, in the 1870s. A Chinese man named Ling Fu was brought before Judge Cornelius Hanford in Seattle's courthouse, accused of not having the proper citizenship papers. He faced deportation, but argued that he did not need to carry papers because he was born on Puget Sound. The judge then said, Ikta mika nem? Consee cole mika? To which Ling replied, Nika nem Ling Fu, pe nika mox tahtlum pee quinum cole. The judge was surprised and said, "You are an American, sure, and you can stay here." Then, to the bailiff, "Ling Fu is dismissed." Oh, and hey, I see the book is on Google Books, with preview. Try Native Seattle, p 64.
So, does this little tale warrant adding somewhere? If so, where? Pfly ( talk) 09:08, 5 November 2010 (UTC)
I removed the two sentences citing Duane Pasco, including:
"...cites a dialogue "between a Chinaman and a Swede" that, he says, was some of the best-spoken Jargon, i.e. the most idiomatic and most articulate, he'd ever heard." (cite here to http://tenaswawa.home.att.net/)
The misquote above is apparently a confabulation of:
"The jargon served as a means of discourse between those individuals whose language base was uncommon. A Makah of Neah Bay might converse with an Englishman, Frenchman, Chinese, S’Klallam, Tsimshian or Nisqually using Chinook Jargon. ... an Englishman and a Frenchman [not sharing a mutual language] might find this an appropriate form of verbal intercourse." See A note regarding the Jargon dialog and English translations in "Moola John."
The word "Chinaman" appears nowhere on the cited Web site.
In regard to the quotation I removed, Mr. Pasco reports "I can say unequivocally that any of what he's saying is most certainly no quote of mine." Jeffreykopp ( talk) 07:45, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
In Vol 3 Issue #1 of TENAS WAWA Mr. Pasco has a copy of a letter sent to him by one of his assistants in a polyglot mixture of 8 seperate languages. He says in the introduction, "....Back to my co-worker...He spoke Norweigan and some Spanish. He would ask me to say this or that thing in Cantonese, Japanese, various Indian tongues or Chinook Jargon". Could this be what you are referring to? PASIOOKS 173.126.17.248 ( talk) 20:36, 17 October 2009 (UTC)
Chinook Jargon use by English-language speakers was split off from this article unilaterally and was a POV fork; it's also wrong in presuming that only "English-language speakers" were the only other kind of non-indigenous users. Also some linguists/academics maintain that Chinook was a continuum, and its use by "English-language speakers" (and German-language speakers, and Chinese-language speakers, and Hawaiian-language speakers, and Cree-language speakers, and Iroquoian-language speakers) are just as legitimately Chinook Jargon as any form spoken by native peoples. This article (and the other one) needs major trimming of the long word list; but doing so is not helped by "segregating" non-indigenous usages to another page, a mistitlted and a-contextual page to boot. Skookum1 ( talk) 14:45, 2 November 2008 (UTC)
I looked up IP Address 71.217.35.194, who placed the series of fact templates at apparently random through one of the text sections....while I grant some of hte langauge in there has a POV flavour, it's interseting that a number of the items challenged are supported by Jim Holton's book, which was just removed from the external links/further reading, e.g. the creolization at Grand Ronde with Klickitat etc. I even found in various writings (not frmo the chinookology community though) a number of references to how the indigenous-language scholarship community and also band elderes/opliticians have been hostile to the study of CJ because of the threat it represented/s to oldder-language survival, and also because of its role in residential schols and in evangelization. So it's all citable, though the published academics are more concerned with "proving" that hte native phonology is consistent/pervasive and that non-native speakere weren't really CJ speakers etc; much of this built on speculations expanded out of observations made only in teh core Columbai River area, or by extrapoliting hoped-for existence of the sxupposed prot-Jargon. What I'm geting at is that while a lot of the published, and therefore citable material, is highly speculative and subjective in autre but can be cited, much other discussion is hidden in the listserve for CHINOOK (so not citable) or is tucked away in studies on other subjects and other languages. So fine, there's a lot that ne4eds citation here; but it doesn't need half-a-dozen interpolary section-citation templates....anyway I traced the IP address, evidently someone from chinookology inc. who wants to remain nameless (how typical, how very typical), but who might turn up in CHINOOK-L by x-ref'ing Denver CO and maybe *.edu domains in that city/area.....the "Indianization" thing is all too citable, if I could only cite any one of twenty things that Tony has said in conference or in private or by phone; it was in fact a brag of the Grand Ronde revivalists that they had purged the old CJ of English words and replaced them with imports from other native languaegs in order to make it "more Indian". And I'm sure this is even in Holton's book.....though like the back-pedalling about Chiense and Scandinavians (see above) it wouldn't surprse me to find out that he, too, had backpedalled to cover up the very evident prejudices in current academic chinookology; certainly their paranoias are on full display, as in the section above. My end run around this citation challenge, of course, is to finally write that book about my experiences with the online CJ revival an the various illogics and suspect behaviorus/blacklisting I experienced in order for them "to protect the truth" ..... as if they had a monopoly on that, which they don't, especially when there are various truths they refuse to examine..... Skookum1 ( talk) 02:58, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
Just a curiosity more than anything, but I think Kumtux Leelo is a name also found on the Computer Game Star Wars racer (Pod Racers) and as I recall he has wolf - like features. It may have been taken from a Star Wars movie. Does anyone know if this is just a coincidence or can anyone confirm this in the Star wars Racer game? Dees anyone know if this is common that they revert to old languages in film production when looking for words or names that may sound alien? I found this interesting when I came across Kumtux, and I remembered that leelo or leelu is wolf! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Markosjal ( talk • contribs) 09:31, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
I guess I never realized how much of this language I learned growing up in Portland. It would sadden me greatly to see it die. We must preserve every identifiable word. Even in Mexico A man claiming to be from Virginia said "Skookum" to me. I knew exactly what he meant, but I also knew that it was Wawa , and that it was highly improbable that he was from Virginia as he had previously told me. That led us to a discussion of Wawa, which he was unfamiliar with. I found out I was right, he was originally from British Columbia! I post this here because I do not know how to post it in support of my change on the page. http://books.google.com.mx/books?id=Oy8_5S8hMjAC&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=indian+name+rooster+rock+state+park&source=bl&ots=7W1KANtnzT&sig=k6XRYgZ7ZtAlouUs6EYAj59NfjY&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result#PPA102,M1 See bottom of page 102 This supports what I heard as a child, and I do not believe this to be disputable.; —Preceding unsigned comment added by Markosjal ( talk • contribs) 23:26, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
Markosjal ( talk) 17:59, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
==re {{ WikiProject Glossaries}}
== For a while now this page's lengthy glossary has needed trimming, and/or moving to a separate article. Many of the words listed, even obscure ones, are used in regional English, albeit in specialist contexts - e.g. the equestrian terms, or mowitch and moolack by hunters. So maybe List of Chinook Jargon words used in English is one solution; and to this day I think the creation of the "use by English language speakers" was a POV fork, or at best mis-titled as not only English speakers among non-aboriginals used this (and "English-language speakers" includes native people whose primary language is English); the real meaning of that POV fork was "use of CJ by non-native speakers", with "white" implicit (as it's often overlooked that the Hawaiians and the Chinese and otehr non-white, non-native people in the PacNW also spoke CJ, if not according to the strictures of its re-codification by Grand Ronde-based linguistis/linguistic agendas. Mostly on this occasion I'm here to comment on WikiProject Glossaries, which may provide a solution for how to deal with the word-list that's bulking out this article too much; I didn't add it to this page because this page isn't a list/glossary, though it does contain one.... Skookum1 ( talk) 18:38, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
I've removed the bit about Iona Campagnolo, who is no longer Lieutenant Governor and more importantly does NOT as far as I can tell speak CJ. If anyone has evidence that she does, please supply it. I suspect that this claim is based on the fact that when she was installed as Lieutenant Governor she spoke one sentence in CJ. However, that sentence was taken from Lillard and Glavin's book on CJ and is not evidence that can actually use CJ. See: http://thetyee.ca/Life/2006/01/10/StillSpeakChinook/. Bill ( talk) 02:25, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
I've made a proposal for a Chinuk wawa Wikipedia over on Meta. Owen ( talk) 19:32, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
Re this:
It's definitely old-fashioned, and as noted in the subsequent in-line comment, there's a passage in Bushby's journals from Begbie's visit to Lillooet, or what became Lillooet, in 1858 or '59, though there the spelling is "Waw-waw" and the phrasing is "we had a Waw-waw with them". I'm from that area as well as from the Lower Mainland, and have heard several people use it, mostly older or "of a certain background" (rural). It may not be how Jargon loan-words were used in Washington or Oregon, but it definitely was in BC; I'll see if I can find a copy of Bushby to at least cite that and put it in historical, if not current, context. Part of the problem here is that this falls into the purview of the POV-fork article " Chinook Jargon use by English-language speakers", which someone split off (wrongly) a long time ago and which hasn't been "healed"...I'll also consult Terry Glavin, co-author of A Voice Great Within Us to see if it's either in that book or if he knows of any other cites for it.....the further bit, not quoted here, about "lelang" meaning "the tongue" directly, and not just language, is in Harper, Shaw, Gibbs, El Comancho and I'm surprised a citation request was added for that..... Skookum1 ( talk) 00:26, 27 March 2010 (UTC)
I have read in this discussion that there is no right pronunciation, but could there be a more-conservative pronunciation or a more-English pronunciation just as an example? Even some details on the wrong pronunciation might do it. A detailed range of pronunciation variants would be useful and interesting. I'd like to know more about this speech, but as someone with a non-English name, i know better than most folks that pronunciation is not based on spelling, excepting some acronyms. Speaking of spelling, how consistent is the spelling? Are there silent letters? Is there a difference between <c> and <k>? Is <gh> one consonant or two? And so forth. -- Leif Runenritzer ( talk) 06:34, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
User:Huon has started an AfD to get rid of the Skookum article; where the mentions of the Skookum doll and Skookum (cat) went and other citations that were on it went, I don't know, but now there's only the Skookum Tools ref left......which to me is emblematic and representative of the persaviness of the word and concept in modern local usage, and because its information on the meaning of the word is one of the only pages out there that's usable as a cite; the argument that that's not a linguistics cite is totally spurious; this isn't a a language article. On pages about CJ usage by natives, yes, there are further definitions; but this is about non-native use and the presence of this word in NW culture/identity. If only populist usages are there to be cited, it's a form of academic exclusionism.....though there is a Barbara Harris essay on the word out there somewhere, about its adoption into local English and so on....but instead of do some research and improve and cite the article, the deletionist agenda has seen nothing better to do than to try to get rid of it..... Skookum1 ( talk) 02:56, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
I grow wear of the need to patrol this page for biases of the core-bias group, and given my health and age know it's time for me to let go. That the POV fork to Chinook Jargon as used by English speakers has been allowed to stand and nobody else has questioned it says a lot to me of the inherent biases of most others around here, and the paucity of publications in the field that are independent of the biases circulated by the modern/GR group mean it's pointless in Wikipedia guideline/RS terms to try to hold forth here on all the things that are wrong with the premises here and in the sources. That I never published in the field, or had the funding support to proceed with much-needed sourcing or extensive archives around BC that have gone ignored, speaks to the biases of the field and those who have made it into their own image. Time for me to hang it up, anything I'd publish would be critiqued as "he's white anyway" so why bother? one snotty edit comment from a newbie using GR spelling in his user name was enough to tick me off and...well. I'm done. Have the playpen to youselves all you want now. I'll try not to look and learn not to care. Skookum1 ( talk) 06:43, 17 December 2013 (UTC)
Does anyone have any sources on these? Specifically, I'm wondering about Robert Service. I know he used the term cheechako (chxi-chaku), but I can't find any info on him actually knowing the language. It's of particular interest to me as he's a relative of mine. Also, on an unrelated note, should this section just be called "Notable Speakers of Chinook Jargon"? The page definitely has a white focus and I think it would be good to bring in notable Indians as well (Mungo Martin, Eula Petite, Frances Johnson, Charles Depoe etc etc).pʼiɬiɬskin 22:27, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
This term was alleged to have been "not a word", but it is in use and was first heard by me from the late (?) Barbara Harris during our encounters in the early days of the "online Jargon revival"..... it has also been used, I believe, by Terry Glavin, who was co-author with Charles Lillard of A Voice Great Within Us. Formation of words by adding -ology is not illegal in English. Skookum1 ( talk) 06:18, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
It started off as a pidgin (not a full-fledged language) but eventually creolized (became full fledged). I hope the current version of the article is clearer. — kwami ( talk) 01:14, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 3 external links on Chinook Jargon. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 09:18, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 4 external links on Chinook Jargon. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
{{
dead link}}
tag to
http://vancouver.ca/publicart_wac/publicart.exe/indiv_artwork?pnRegistry_No=213{{
dead link}}
tag to
http://archon.archives.pdx.edu/index.php?p=collections%2Fcontrolcard&id=52&q=chinookWhen you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 06:19, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
Title. the table is ugly, it's overly defined with English pronunciations, sorted alphabetically and not by place of articulation, and inconsisttent with Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Omoutuazn ( talk • contribs) 02:48, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
I added some references as requested in the section for words used by English-language speakers, especially the controversial Siwash. Hopefully for the better. Fimbriata ( talk) 20:00, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
This article doesn’t give any information about the language! I came across Chinook in an article about the evolution of French. The author Raymond Queneau observed that in the previous 50 years, the syntax of spoken French had altered radically and he claimed that this form of the language, which he termed néo-français or troisième français, resembled Chinook. A typical sentence consisted of a list of substantives followed by a “skeleton” sentence with pronouns replacing the substantives. Example ‘’Le gendarme, le voleur il l’a attrapé’’ ("The policeman, the thief, he caught him” for "The policeman caught the thief"). The phenomenon, which I have observed myself, doesn't happen in English nor as far as I can see in other European languages. See https://www.grin.com/document/323136 for details. I would have liked to see if this is indeed also the case with Chinook.
Franciscus montmartinensis ( talk) 16:43, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
@ SMcCandlish Recently, I changed the number of "native speakers" listed in the language infobox from "More than 640 (at least 3 native adult speakers alive in 2019 based on estimates from the Chinook Jargon Listserv archives)" to "1". Shortly afterwards, you removed the listing of just one native speaker saying "Claiming there is exactly one speaker is also unsourced speaker information, and almost certainly wrong."
I was surprised by this because I thought the source that I had provided a source, specifically the
Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online (APICS), through the template's ref
parameter. Additionally, I think there is an important distinction to be made between native speakers and speakers who have learned the Chinook Jargon as a second language.
Sources, including the APICS one I mentioned earlier do point towards there being a second language community for Chinook Jargon. Specifically, the APICS source suggests "maybe 1000 people with L2 knowledge (via oral or written means)" and the self-report 2009-2013 American Community Survey currently cited in the article estimated 20-70 people spoke Chinook Jargon at home in the United States. As to there being precisely 1 native speaker living, a situation where the exact number of native living speakers is known isn't uncommon for endangered Native American languages, compare the Upper Chinook language where the number of remaining native speakers was precisely tracked and known over time as they died.
If there are some additional details about my initial edit which explain why it was partially undone, I would be interested in learning about those. Thanks and take care. — The Editor's Apprentice ( talk) 19:53, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
|ref=
parameter has output that is specifically attached to the output of the |speakers=
parameter (which is frankly pretty weird infobox coding), or that |speakers=
outputs a specifically "native" speakers claim (which is confusing since the parameter doesn't match its rendered name, and probably not helpful anyway, since I doubt our readers care much about number of people who knew a language since childhood versus number of people who actually know a language, and at any rate our readers probably care much more about the latter). Since Chinook Jargon is a trade pidgin or creole, it seems dubious that it is the first language of anyone at all, even if there remains a speaker who has known it since they were little as a second language learned alongside their first. The entire notion of "native speaker" in a case like this is kind of dubious, and the infobox presently suggesting that there is only 1 speaker is misleading, and would basically mean that this is a dead language (a language you can't speak or write intelligibly with anyone else in the world is already dead for all intents and purposes). Anyway, at very least the second-language learning material you mention from APICS and ACS is probably worth adding to the article. But the infobox also supports |speakers2=
to add information on total speakers, or another option is using |speakers_label=
to remove "native" from the output of |speakers=
and use a larger number there. I think we should do something to make it clearer to a reader of the infobox that there is not just one speaker left. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
22:10, 22 October 2023 (UTC)