This is a wonderful 19th century photo of a famous person from the Pacific Northwest — the daughter of Chief Seattle, dubbed Princess Angeline. I knew about her when I was growing up, and Chief Seattle, too, since they’re such key figures in the history of the area, and I’ve seen this photo many times. That is a strong and dignified face.
But I’d never known how she came by such a European name, until now. It’s a genuinely cringeworthy story.
Born in 1820 in Lushootseed, near modern day Seattle, Kikisoblu (Kick-is-om-lo) was the first daughter of Chief Seattle, the leader of a Suquamish Tribe (Suquamish) and Dkhw’Duw’Absh (Duwamish). When American settlers arrived in Seattle, Chief Seattle befriended one of them, David Swinson “Doc” Maynard.
When the second wife of “Doc” Maynard, Catherine Maynard, saw the beautiful Kiksoblu, she said, “You are too good looking for a woman to carry around such a name as that, and I now christen you Angeline.”
Kikisoblu is a lovely name! In fact, all the Coast Salish place names that dot Western Washington are pretty and resonant — so it’s odd to see that kind of dismissal. And the Maynards have a reputation as being the early settlers who were most sympathetic to the natives. (Shhh, don’t tell anyone, but the pioneers that named a city after an Indian chief were mostly brutal, violent, and aggressive towards the people who lived there first — Seattle itself was a permanent collection of Coast Salish villages that had existed for about 4,000 years before the Europeans showed up. Surprising, I know.)
White sympathy is worth a hand full of shit. A New White Excuse: “I Was At Standing Rock!”
Well, turnabout is fair play and with everyone being so sympathetic I’m sure the reverse would have gone down very well: “You’re far too annoying to be named Catherine so I now christen you Meeeeeeeeeeeep.”
That parenthetical pronunciation — can that be right? I’m not getting how a ‘b’ becomes an ‘m’, or vice versa.
Yet another example of the white, xtians interpretation of noblese oblige. It follows the westward expansion from the east to the midwest and south, to the west coast and out to Alaska and Hawaii. The people who lived in these areas for thousands of years were subjugated, forced to give up their religion for a sillier one, forced to give up their lands, their names, and their dignities, and, all too often, their lives. Whether it is because they felt guilty or because native names sounded cool, the remnants of those people can be found in the names the whites gave to their cities, counties, and geographical features.
That is a strong and dignified face.
Her face appears to bear the lines of years of a sort of “oh, yeah?” skeptical expression.
Perhaps we can rename some politicians. I would like to start with “white-furred shitweasel” (you may remember him when he was called Jeff Sessions)
An “m” is the just nasalized version of “b” (which is the vocalized version of “p”). Try saying them all.
My guess is that the Suquamish sound was some sort of intermediary between the nasalized and vocalized version.
Yeah, there are a lot of variant spellings of Seattle, too. How do you get that word out of Sealth or Se’alh? How do you get Duwamish from Dkhw’Duw’Absh? Why do those double-Ls in Eyjafjallajökull have a “t” sound in them?
Spelling is only a crude approximation of the sounds we make.
Why is it called “to christen” somebody?
Okay, strike that, I think I know why.
Why do we still call it “to christen” somebody?
Nemo:
Don’t know much Irish, then? Or any other language?
#8 a couple of hundred years or so ago a large number of kid wouldnt make it to their christening where they were officially named – birth certificates started in the UK in 1837. The high perinatal death rates led people to not name children until their christening. So ‘to christen’ became a sort of substitute for ‘to name’
At #9 – yeah, Gaelic is baaad that way … I never could figure out …if you are an English monk, “romanizing” an alphabet for a heretofore unwritten language, WHY would you spell it Sian or Sean, instead of Shawn? And what’s with all those unpronounced h’s? At least French and German make some sense (English, not so much).
Perhaps because the use of “sh” to represent /ʃ/ didn’t arise till sometime in the middle English phase; at the time, if monks were trying to represent the /ʃ/ sound based on English orthography, they probably would have spelled it “sc”. Of course, it’s also likely that back then, the name Sean in Irish was pronounce /s/; it’s a fairly common phenomenon for /s/ to become palatalized before a high front vowel (think of English words like “vision”; it’s also akin to what happens when we say “didja” or “wouldja”).
Of course there’s the broader question of how to use the Latin alphabet to represent sounds that never occurred in Latin. For /ʃ/, several different solutions have been used: digraphs such as sh-, ch-, and sch- (I guess that’s a trigraph); other letters such as x (in Iberia, including older versions of Castilian), and various variants on s: š, ş, and, in IPA*, /ʃ/.
French only makes sense in comparison to English. It’s really a horrible spelling system that holds on to archaic endings and makes learning the language much more complicated than it should be. If you want to see a sensible application of the Latin alphabet to a modern language, study Turkish. But most linguists’ favorite writing system is Korean.
*The alphabet, not the ale. Though I approve of both.
Ack, in my first paragraph that should be “the name Sean in Irish was pronounced with an /s/.
All proceeds go to Tpyos.
And apologies for the (further) derailing. To help get this on track, I’ll also point out that “christen” literally means “to make Christian”. So not only was she renaming Kikisoblu, she was also trying to rob her of her religion.
@Cain
Funny thing, i know very little about languages. But i know German, English and Latin, which are the basis for nearly all living languages using* the Latin Alphabet. This let me to believe that you where majorly overplaying your hand and i startet to research. A direct search did not result in anything, so i started to listen to language examples and their history on Youtube (thank you Langfocus for you wonderful channel). This is my conclusion:
Latin has a very strong difference between b and m. And so does German, which uses the Latin sounds one to one.
This has far reaching consequences.
Italian, Portugiese and Castilian Spanish fall under the Latin sounds, so does French (barely).
With German you also get the North Germanic Languages.
Then you have English another mixture from Germanic and Latin. Which has also a clear difference between b and m at least most of the major dialects.
Which leaves Irish and other Q-Celtic languages, with a basis much older than the Latin and Germanic influences in the region. These is not only a rare exception in the b vs m case, they are also nearly dead and considered strongly endangered. So it is unsurprising that one has not heard of them.
Here we have all major languages that use* the Latin alphabet and with the exception of Irish all of them have a difference between b and m. Not accounting for the thousands of local or even major dialects, which would be impossible.
But maybe i missed something, so which other languages, that uses* the Latin Alphabet, have a similar sound between b and m are there that one could be reasonably expected to know?
*And with that i mean use it as basis of their language, not that there is a phonetic approximation of the language in it. It is unsurprising to find a language with an approximation in the Latin Alphabet that does not fit 100 % with the common usage of that alphabet.
I can scarcely imagine growing up in a place where human society has changed so dramatically within the last couple centuries. I guess I’d just learn to take it for granted, and most people wouldn’t care about history anyway?
@Turi1337 .,
Try this. Make the sound /m/, then the sound /b/ and the sound /p/. Pay attention to how you make them, and specifically, where are your lips? your tongue? how does the air flow? How are those sounds similar? Different? Are the similarities and differences the same for all three languages?
Now do the same for /n/, /d/ and /t/.
Now think about this: how do the words “grandma” and “grandpa” become “gramma” and “grampa” in spoken English?
For extra credit, how are the final consonants in “kin” and “king” similar? Different?
This oddly reminds me of the first book in the Paddington bear series. The bear is from Peru and doesn’t have a “real” name only a Peruvian one. So the helpful white family name him after pretty much the first English word they see (Paddington train station).
Except, this is a real person not a fictional you teddy bear.
*toy teddy bear
My grandfather arrived at Ellis Island in 1912. His given name was Umberto. Apparently, someone in naturalization didn’t like that so they changed hi name to Ralph. He hated being called Ralph.
“If I don’t like your name, do I get to rechristen you?”
I suggest we ask Dumbald McDumbTrump.