Cas City Forum Hall & CAS-L
GENERAL TOPICS => Books & Movies => Topic started by: PJ Hardtack on August 10, 2012, 08:57:29 PM
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Been re-reading "A Great Voice Within Us" - The Story of Chinook, lingua franca of the west coast, a mixture of aboriginal dialects, French and English expressions. ISBN 0-921586-56-6, New Star Books.
It was used extensively during the fur trade and gold rush eras, many of the words and terms still lingering in use, but it's origins pre-date first contact according to native elders. Gun powder was "pollalie", not a word you hear as often as "skookum", meaning strong or big. Another favourite is "muckamuck" meaning food. I used to eat in a restaurant by that name in Vancouver, specializing in salmon.
Here's an interesting quote:
" ...the human landscape west of the Rockies still contains six major linguistic families, much like the Indo-European language family. Six of the eleven aboriginal linguistic families in all of Canada were indigenous to tribal territories now enclosed by British Columbia's borders.
A useful illustration of this staggering diversity is that observation that a person will cross more language barriers on the road from Vancouver to Prince George than on the road from Madrid to Moscow."
That explains to me why Indians in the Nicola Valley southwest of Kamloops cannot speak to the natives at Spences Bridge and Ashcroft, a mere 60 miles away. It's like that all through the interior of BC and along the coast.
If anyone is interested, I post the Lord's Prayer in Chinook. Never know when that might come in handy ....