Chinook Jargon never gets a fair shake. He probably cause he couldn’t figure out how to write it.
Posted by James Crippen at May 20, 2007 09:31 PMI looked up the website indicated above, looking specifically at the Native American/Canadian languages, but not all of those listed (which are relatively few) are accessible from the web.
About Chinook Jargon (a kind of pidgin): all kinds of people were writing Chinook Jargon at one time, each according to his own lights (there are numerous "dictionaries" of it, published at different times), but missionaries found its largely utilitarian vocabulary wanting when it came to preaching, and even more so when they tried to translate religious texts. That Rev. Garrett should have made the attempt while in Victoria, B.C. (Canada) is not surprising, since a number of different ethnic groups speaking a wide variety of languages were residing there at the time, and the Jargon was used (and developed) to communicate between groups (by both natives and newcomers). But missionaries dealing with specific groups in their own territories did the translations into the languages of those groups, which had much richer vocabularies (as well as more complex sound systems, which did not deter the translators).
Posted by marie-lucie at May 20, 2007 10:08 PMNote that the part about Chinese briefly mentions the need to produce a "spoken/colloquial" version to go along with the "written" version -- and that they found that romanization was the best way to make sure that as many people understood the spoken version as possible.
Posted by Matt at May 22, 2007 12:46 AMThat "Bohemian" translation must be interesting. First, the place of printing is given as "we Swatem Ludowiku" (standard ortography: "ve svatém Ludovíku"). It took about two minutes of staring blankly at screen to figure out that they meant St. Louis. St. = svatý, Louis = Ludovík.
But what follows is even more interesting: "Pulnocne Americe", obviously meaning "North America". Your standard Czech word for "north, northern" is "severní". "Půlnoční" is a cognate to Polish "północny". And while it is commonly used in the legendary Bible kralická, this is the first time I've seen it used in a non-biblical context.