Chrysti The Wordsmith: Chinook - 1

Greetings and welcome to Christie the wordsmith. The indigenous people who lived along the coast of southern Alaska to Oregon are thought to have been among the most linguistically diverse in the world. Coastal native peoples such as the new touchy helos Kwok Util and Tillamook lived in close proximity to one another yet spoke mutually unintelligible languages. These many groups interdependent upon one another for trade goods and food specialties cross the language barrier by developing a common tongue consisting of a few hundred words to describe basic ideas. This trade language named Chinook jargon incorporated vocabulary from several area languages but with the heaviest borrowing coming from the tribal language of the Chinook. A group living on the lower Columbia River. Chinook jargon consisted of words for food animals greetings and trade goods. It was inadequate however to express the nuance cultural distinctives of government spirituality and technology. This business language may have developed among coastal groups long before European contact. But as Europeans

traded and settled in the area many English French and even Scandinavian terms were also incorporated into Chinook jargon. Some of the vocabulary of the jargon survives in the western US and Canada such as cayuse meaning horse Skookum meaning strong connection ect. The leaves of a smokeable plant and high muck a muck. Well take a look at the latter. Next time I'm Christie the wordsmith Christie the wordsmith is sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Zoot enterprises. A high tech firm in Bozeman Montana offering challenging careers and innovative solutions for the financial services industry sued web dotcom.