The Sound of the Nootka / Nuu-chah-nulth language (Numbers, Sentences, Phrases & Story)

Nuu-chah-nulth, also known as Nootka, is Wakashan language historically spoken on the west coast of Vancouver Island, from Barkley Sound to Quatsino Sound in British Columbia by the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples. Nuu-chah-nulth is a Southern Wakashan language related to Nitinaht and Makah.

It is the first language of the indigenous peoples of the Cascadian Coast to have documentary written materials describing it. In the 1780s, Captains Vancouver, Quadra, and other European explorers and traders frequented Nootka Sound and the other Nuu-chah-nulth communities, making reports of their voyages. From 1803–1805 John R. Jewitt, an English blacksmith, was held captive by chief Maquinna at Nootka Sound. He made an effort to learn the language, and in 1815 published a memoir with a brief glossary of its terms.

The Nuu-chah-nulth language contributed much of the vocabulary of the Chinook Jargon. It is thought that oceanic commerce and exchanges between the Nuu-chah-nulth and other Southern Wakashan speakers with the Chinookan-speaking peoples of the lower Columbia River led to the foundations of the trade jargon that became known as Chinook. Nootkan words in Chinook Jargon include hiyu ("many"), from Nuu-chah-nulth for "ten", siah ("far"), from the Nuu-chah-nulth for "sky".

A dictionary of the language, with some 7,500 entries, was created after 15 years of research. It is based on both work with current speakers and notes from linguist Edward Sapir, taken almost a century ago. The dictionary, however, is a subject of controversy, with a number of Nuu-chah-nulth elders questioning the author's right to disclose their language.

The provenance of the term "Nuu-chah-nulth", meaning "along the outside [of Vancouver Island]" dates from the 1970s, when the various groups of speakers of this language joined together, disliking the term "Nootka" (which means "go around" and was mistakenly understood to be the name of a place, which was actually called Yuquot). The name given by earlier sources for this language is Tahkaht; that name was used also to refer to themselves (the root aht means "people").

Translations of place names

Nuuchahnulth had a name for each place within their traditional territory. These are just a few still used to this day:

• hisaawista (esowista) – Captured by clubbing the people who lived there to death, Esowista Peninsula and Esowista Indian Reserve No. 3.

• Yuquot (Friendly Cove) – Where they get the north winds, Yuquot

• nootk-sitl (Nootka) – Go around.

• maaqtusiis – A place across the island, Marktosis

• kakawis – Fronted by a rock that looks like a container.

• kitsuksis – Log across mouth of creek

• opitsaht – Island that the moon lands on, Opitsaht

• pacheena – Foamy.

• tsu-ma-uss (somass) – Washing, Somass River

• tsahaheh – To go up.

• hitac`u (itatsoo) – Ucluelet Reserve.

• t’iipis – Polly’s Point.

• Tsaxana – A place close to the river.

• Cheewat – Pulling tide.

The Sound of the Haida language (Numbers, Greetings, Sentences & Phrases)

Haida (X̱aat Kíl, X̱aadas Kíl, X̱aayda Kil, Xaad kil) is the language of the Haida people, spoken in the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the coast of British Columbia and on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska. An endangered language, Haida currently has 24 native speakers, though revitalization efforts are underway.

At the time of the European arrival at Haida Gwaii in 1774, it is estimated that Haida speakers numbered about 15,000. Epidemics soon led to a drastic reduction in the Haida population, which became limited to three villages: Masset, Skidegate, and Hydaburg. Positive attitudes towards assimilation combined with the ban on speaking Haida in residential schools led to a sharp decline in the use of the Haida language among the Haida people, and today almost all ethnic Haida use English to communicate.

Classification of the Haida language is a matter of controversy, with some linguists placing it in the Na-Dené language family and others arguing that it is a language isolate. Haida itself is split between Northern and Southern dialects, which differ primarily in phonology. The Northern Haida dialects have developed pharyngeal consonants, typologically uncommon sounds which are also found in some of the nearby Salishan and Wakashan languages.

The Haida sound system includes ejective consonants, glottalized sonorants, contrastive vowel length, and phonemic tone. The nature of tone differs between the dialects, and in Alaskan Haida it is primarily a pitch accent system. Syllabic laterals appear in all dialects of Haida, but are only phonemic in Skidegate Haida. Extra vowels which are not present in Haida words occur in nonsense words in Haida songs. There are a number of systems for writing Haida using the Latin alphabet, each of which represents the sounds of Haida differently.

While Haida has nouns and verbs, it does not have adjectives and has few true adpositions. English adjectives translate into verbs in Haida, for example 'láa "(to be) good", and English prepositional phrases are usually expressed with Haida "relational nouns", for instance Alaskan Haida dítkw 'side facing away from the beach, towards the woods'. Haida verbs are marked for tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality, and person is marked by pronouns that are cliticized to the verb. Haida also has hundreds of classifiers. Haida has the rare direct-inverse word order type, where both SOV and OSV words orders occur depending on the "potency" of the subject and object of the verb. Haida also has obligatory possession, where certain types of nouns cannot stand alone and require a possessor.

Today most Haidas do not speak the Haida language. The language is listed as "critically endangered" in UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, with nearly all speakers elderly. As of 2003, most speakers of Haida are between 70 and 80 years of age, though they speak a "considerably simplified" form of Haida, and comprehension of the language is mostly limited to persons above the age of 50. The language is rarely used even among the remaining speakers and comprehenders.

The Haida have a renewed interest in their traditional culture, and are now funding Haida language programs in schools in the three Haida communities, though these have been ineffectual.  Haida classes are available in many Haida communities and can be taken at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, Ketchikan, and Hydaburg. A Skidegate Haida language app is available for iPhone, based on a "bilingual dictionary and phrase collection comprised of words and phrases archived at the online Aboriginal language database FirstVoices.com."

In 2017 Kingulliit Productions began filming on SGaawaay K’uuna ("Edge of the Knife"), the first feature film to be acted entirely in dialects of the Haida language.

Your Chinook Wawa Word of the Day: Tzum

TZUM

[tsŭm] or [chŭm]  — adjective, noun.

Meaning: Color; spot; spotted; stripe; writing; write; written; mark; marked; figures; colors; printing; pictures; paint; painted; ornamental colors; tint; mixed colors; festive colors.

Origin: From a Chinookan particle ts’am 'variegated (in color)', ts’em 'spotted' > Lower Chinook ch'əám, “variegated”

Oncorhynchus keta

Sometimes spelled as ‘chum’, the word is most famously applied to the Chum Salmon (Oncorhynchus keta), found from southern California to Alaska and off the coasts of Japan and Korea, while the term "tzum sammon" is used to refer to the steelhead and any number of spotted trout in the region.

The extremely versatile expression "mamook tzum" can mean anything from ‘to write’, ‘to mark’, ‘to draw’, ‘to paint’, ‘to print’, ‘dye’, ‘copy’, ‘engrave’, and ‘subscribe’.

Someone like a “tzum man” (writer; penman; clerk) would likely use a "tzum stick" (pencil; pen; paintbrush) and "klale chuck kopa mamook tzum" (ink) to create “tzum pepah” (picture; writing; a letter; printed material) or denote "tzum illahee" (surveyed land).

Likewise, a woodsman will “tzum kah” (track) or "tzum kah lepee mitlite" (mark where the foot was) while they, “mamook tzum illahee” (survey) or “mamook tzum iktas” (assess) the area to “mamook kunsih” (enumerate) items in it.

While this word also applies to a “tzum seeowist” (photograph; postage stamp), “tzum pasese” (quilt; bed quilt), or “tzum sail” (calico; printed cloth), it could just as easily have to do with colored stones or availability of ochre or other pigments.

The Sound of the Chinook Jargon language (Numbers, Greetings & Story)

Chinook Wawa (also known as Chinuk Wawa or Chinook Jargon, and sometimes Chinook Lelang) is a nearly extinct pidgin trade language that bordered on being a creole language which served as a true lingua franca of the Cascadia bioregion for several hundred years.

Partly related to, but not the same as, the aboriginal language of the Chinook people, Chinook Wawa actually has its roots in earlier regional trade languages, like Haida Jargon or Nookta Jargon, which itself was a simplified version of Nuu-chah-nulth combined with words and elements of the different Wakashan, Salishan, Athapaskan, and Penutian languages. With the arrival of European explorers, trappers, and traders, many new words were added from French and English, with modifications made in pronunciation, using only those sounds that could be pronounced with ease by all speakers. Grammatical forms were reduced to their simplest expression, and variations in mood and tense conveyed only by adverbs or by the context. With a relatively small lexicon of only a few hundred words, it is not only easy to learn but possible to say almost anything with a little patience and poetic imagination.

During the fur trade in the early 19th century,  Chinook Wawa had more than 100,000 speakers, spreading from the lower Columbia River, first to other areas in modern Oregon and Washington, then British Columbia, and as far as Alaska and the Yukon Territory. It was used as a common trade language between the hundreds of indigenous tribes and nations from the region and was incorporated by early English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and other immigrants, pioneers, and traders who made the area their home, and naturally became the first language in multi-racial households and in multi-ethnic work environments such as canneries, lumberyards, and ranches where it remained the language of the workplace well into the middle of the 20th century.

HOW IS IT PRONOUNCED?

As a trade language, Chinook Wawa is by its very nature meant to be usable by people from many different linguistic backgrounds, so naturally, there is no "correct" pronunciation. An individual's pronunciation of a word was necessarily going to be dependent on that person's own language and dialect, be it English, French, Salish, Nuu-chah-nulth, Chinese, or even Hawaiian.

Furthermore, all published lexicons were created by English speakers influenced by standard English spelling methods (and, as everyone knows, there is no consistency at all in English spelling). Still, the wide variation in spellings for many words can give a clue to their potential variation in pronunciation, or for a pronunciation that falls "in-between" the sounds represented (i.e. hiyu / hyiu / hyo is one example, and tikegh / tikke / ticky is another). Though existent in Chinook Jargon, the consonant /r/ is rare, and English and French loan words, such as ‘rice’ and ‘merci’, have changed in their adoption to the Jargon, to ‘lice’ and ‘mahsie’, respectively.

CHINOOK WAWA TODAY.

As a result of deliberate measures of genocide and cultural suppression in the United States and Canada, aboriginal languages, including Chinook Wawa, were suppressed or outright banned, resulting in a decline of speakers. While Chinook Wawa has fallen from use in the late 20th century, it has lived on in many toponyms throughout Cascadia, within many indigenous languages, and in some regional English usage, to the point where most people are unaware that the word or name is originally from Chinook Wawa.

Chinuk Wawa was classified as extinct until the 2000s when it was revived, notably in 2014 with the release of Chinuk Wawa—As Our Elders Teach Us to Speak It by the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon, who have since launched the Chinuk Wawa Immersion Language Program. In 2018 a textbook for Chinook Jargon in Esperanto (La Chinuka Interlingvo Per Esperanto,] The Chinook Bridge-Language Using Esperanto) was published by Sequoia Edwards. In 2019 "Chinuk Wawa" became available as a language option on the fanfiction website Archive of Our Own. With a steadily growing interest in Cascadia and its history, Chinook Wawa is seeing a gradual resurgence.

Cascadia Open Education Summit coming up in British Columbia and online, April 27-29

Regional Influence. Global Impact.

The Cascadia Open Education Summit is a unique three-day, internationally attended event where thought leaders come together to share groundbreaking ideas, research, and best practices for using open educational resources (OER). Their delegates include government officials, faculty, academic administrators and leaders, educational developers and technologists, librarians, instructional designers, student support staff, and students.

The 8th annual Summit will be digital and will be a mix of live and pre-recorded sessions delivered through the virtual platform provider, EventMobi. The event follows on the 2019 Cascadia Open Education Summit which took place in Vancouver, B.C. on April 17 & 18, 2019, co-hosted by Lumen Learning, Open Oregon Educational Resources, and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC).

Cascadia Open Education Summit welcomed people engaged in higher ed-focused open education initiatives, including students, faculty, librarians, instructional technologists, administrators, and other campus leaders.

For More Information, Check Out:

Https://Cascadia.Bccampus.Ca/

Join the Cascadia Election Response Network

When we organize, we win.

Since November 3rd, we have had more than 1200 people sign up to join our Cascadia Election Response Network. More than just about any one candidate or election, we see this as a pivotal moment in history when we must start preparing networks of mutual aid, local resilience, training and preparation for times of emergency, and if ever needed, civil disobedience. Be it an emergency, man made or natural, or fighting against the rising tide of fascism, climate change, economic inequity, systemic oppression or misinformation, we will be ready.

These types of networks don’t just happen. Historically, it is often the result of serious training. Time and again, we have demonstrated the power that unified, nonviolent, mass-action can have in the face of illegitimate regimes seeking to subvert the will of the people.

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