Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/98

76 Indian's mind and spirit were the sieve through which it was strained. His was the governing philology. This kept it simple. This accounts for the child-like freshness and charm of the word combinations. This, in short, is what made it a literary language instead of a harsh, emotionless and artificial esperanto.

Much of the poetry of the Chinook jargon comes from the application of a single adjective to an assortment of nouns to form by this combination new nouns instead of having separate substantives. For instance, take tenas, an adjective meaning small. Then take this list of nouns: snass—rain, waum—warm, cole—cold, moos-moos—cow, klootchman—woman. Then tenas snass would be a shower—little rain; tenas waum would be spring and tenas cole would be autumn—the season when it was getting a little warm or a little cold; tenas moos-moos, a small cow or a calf, and tenas klootchman, a small woman or a girl. How much more charming these synthetic phrases are than separate terms, as in a richer language, since the source of the meaning is right there with all its original atmosphere.

The jargon gets a poetic quality from another child-like characteristic—that of onomatopoeia. "… most of the words," said Hezekiah Butterworth, "resemble in sounds the objects they represent. For example, a wagon in Chinook is chick-chick, a clock is ding-ding, a crow is kaw-kaw; a duck, quack-quack; a laugh, tee-hee; the heart is tum-tum, and a talk or a speech or sermon, wah-wah." It is not true, of course, that most words are of this nature, but the list given by Butterworth could be greatly extended from any Chinook jargon dictionary.