I’ve read about fishing, whales, food, words, etc. I’ve looked at maps and aerial images of Nootka Sound and tried to follow the tribes travels to Tahsis and learn the area.

I constantly make notes while listening and then research these notes on the Internet, which led me to this site. I am currently listening to the audio book version of Jewitt’s book and am very, very interested and fascinated in this history. I wish I could say more about |ar-smootish-check-up|, but I can’t connect |ar-smoot| to anything that I know. Concerning Jewitt’s |cha-alt-see-klat-tur-wah|, modern ncn čaʔaałči ƛatw̓aa is a good sentence, but it means ‘go paddle!’, not ‘go away’. One might say in ncn kaaʔa ʔaḥn̓ii ‘give me that by you’, but kaaʔa ʔaḥkuu is strange. Even today, p̓ačiƛ is a very formal word, not for everyday giving. As for Jewitt’s phrases |kah-ah-pah-chilt| ‘give me something’, |kah-ah-coh| ‘bring it’, I interpret these as #kaaʔa p̓ačiƛ ‘give me give’, and #kaaʔa ʔaḥkuu ‘give me this, here’, both of which sound like pidgin ncn. Jewitt’s |ma-mook-su-mah| looks quite unlike this native system. Similar are intransitive mamuuk ‘working, weaving’ and transitive ʔuutaq ‘working on it’. For example, the intransitive verbs čiic, c̓iiƛc̓iiya, t̓aaƛt̓aaya describe specific styles of fishing (‘trolling’, ‘dip-netting’, ‘jigging’), while the transitive verb ʔuʔuʔiiḥ ‘harvesting it’ covers harvesting food in general. Nuuchahnulth and its sister Westcoast languages have many suppletive verb pairs where a specific intransitive verb is related to a more general transitive verb. Jewitt’s phrase |ma-mook-su-mah| ‘to go to fish’ is also not good ncn, according to my experience. (Though I should point out that even in natural ncn, the words čakup ‘man’, łuucsma ‘woman’ are used as general modifiers meaning ‘male’, ‘female’.) His phrases |tanassis-check-up|, |tanassis-kloots-mah| strike me as pidginified. Since this is the usage across Modern ncn, I assume that it was in Jewitt’s time too. Instead, the words ḥaaw̓iłaƛ ‘young man’ and ḥaakʷaaƛ ‘young woman’ are used for these meanings. In contrast to its sister languages Ditidaht and Makah, modern Nuuchahnulth has no words for ‘son’ or ‘daughter’. Here are some more specific comments on particular concepts. What do you think?ĭave, I agree with your overall point that Jewitt’s short wordlist shows signs of pidginization. At-lah-quelth,Eight.Ĭhee-me-na,A fish-hook. Kom-me-tak,I understand.Įen-nuk-see,Fire or fuel. Cha-alt-see-klat-tur- ( Go off orĬha-hak,Fresh water. Southern Wakashanist friends, I ask you to carefully look through this little lexicon and comment in detail on it…Ī list of Words in the Nootkian Language,

the terms for ‘son’ and ‘daughter’ are parallel in structure to Chinuk Wawa’s (each having a literal meaning of ‘little man’ and ‘little woman’).Īnd ‘to go to fish’ is ma-mook-su-mah (literally ‘make fish’, just as CW expresses the harvesting of any natural resource with mamuk-NOUN), so maybe that metaphor too traces back earlier than CW.įor fun, I’ve put in red the phrases below that look syntactically interesting as potential models for early Chinuk Wawa. Jewitt’s list on page has a number of indications of pidginization, I’d say.Į.g. In a very early (1815) edition of his memoir of Vancouver Island captivity (1803-1805), John Rodgers Jewitt added a nice one-page vocabulary of Nuuchahnulth… …It’s clearly not a copy from anyone else’s, making it a highly valuable document of a time when there was no known clear boundary line between “Nootka Jargon” and Chinuk Wawa.

Nootka language