Monday Meanderings - 9.10.2018

My new friend Jack

I mentioned last post that I was narrating an audio book about early tourism along the Inside Passage on the Southwest coast of Alaska - a subject and place that resonates with me.

But the book is proving somewhat of a challenge in that it is full of words that I don't know how to pronounce. - many of them Alaskan Native names and phrases - primarily Tlingit, one of the many First Nation tribes that inhabited Alaska thousands of years before the white man showed up to "discover" Alaska.

My usual methodology for finding pronunciations is to check out some (or all) of the 30 pronouncing dictionaries I have bookmarked, then use a couple of specialized search engines, then finally just Google the term, hoping to find a discussion or better yet a YouTube video with the proper pronunciation.

Failing these methods, I start calling Libraries and Chambers of Commerce, or commercial establishments, or in this case Native Alaskan Association offices and talking to people. That's how I acquired my new best friend Jack. Jack turned out to be a 30-year resident of Alaska and wrote "local interest" items for a newspaper in Juneau, Alaska. He wrote about many of the same people and incidents that are in my book, and I kept running across these articles in my searches, so I set out to find Jack to see if he might be a good resource for the proper pronunciation of " Kwakwaka’wakw" or " Tatshenshin," among other things.

After a few tries, I found Jack. Or rather he found me. I got his first call while Barb and I were out shopping, and I did manage to keep that conversation under 30 minutes. The next call, I was not so lucky. Jack is a lonely man. Jack wanted to talk. And talk he did - for almost an hour. He sprinkled just enough responses to the list of words that I had sent him to keep me from trying the old "zzzzttt!!! sssppppttt!! You're kkkkrree breaking up, Jac...sssspppttt!! call crrrrrsh back...." trick, but even so, Barb finally came and pantomimed, "Do I need to rescue you?" about 45 minutes into this conversation.

Next Jack began an email campaign of articles that he thought I might be interested in. And they are somewhat interesting, but do nothing to further my quest for correct pronunciations, and they just heightened my concern for what I had gotten myself into.

But last week I got a short (!) email from Jack that said he had run out of resources and couldn't find any more pronunciations.

I thanked him for his help, and I might have mentioned that I would be in Antarctica for a year or so, so he might not be able to reach me by phone for a long, long while.
 
Be careful what you ask for. Or, who you ask!