Pronunciation of "Alki"

Question

I recently noted in a posting here that the modern pronunciation of "Alki" is /&lkaI/. This is a Chinook word meaning "by-and-by, soon, in the future is /'&lkaI/; it formed part of the name of the original settlement of what became Seattle ("New York Alki", i.e., "someday we hope to approximate New York (Largest City in America)", and "Alki" is the state motto of Washington. And there's still an Alki Beach in Seattle.
I had originally assumed, based on the spelling, that the pronunciation should be /'&lki/, but, to my surprise, the pronunciation is /&lkaI/. But according to at least one web page, the original pronunciation was /&lki/. It was changed to /&lkaI/ during Prohibition, presumably because /&lki/ suggested "alkie" = alcoholic.
I don't know whether all that is true. Someone who actually lived in or on Alki Beach and other parts of Seattle during the relevant period the late 1920s, the early 1930s might be able to give us some firsthand information. Perhaps there is an AUE poster out there who fits that bill.

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]I recently noted in a posting here that the modern pronunciation of "Alki" is /&lkaI/. This is a Chinook word ... (Largest City in America)", and "Alki" is the state motto of Washington. And there's still an Alki Beach in Seattle.[/nq]
It's not a Chinook word, most likely. It's a Chinook Wawa word. Big difference. The Chinook were hundreds of miles to the south of Seattle, and Chinook is a polysynthetic language, like all the others in this culture area, though it is Chinookan, and thus unrelated to the languages spoken around Puget Sound, which are all in the Salishan family.

Chinook Wawa (Chinook Jargon), by contrast, is a contact pidgin language (creolized during the last century and still spoken natively on the Grand Ronde reservation in Oregon), and was the lingua franca among all the tribes and the early settlers in the Northwest. Like all pidgin and creole languages everywhere, and quite unlike all the languages in the area, it is an analytic language like English, with very little in the way of morphology (though it has a typical Northwest phonology, full of ejective consonants). It has borrowed words from many first nation languages, notably Nuchanulh (Nootka) and Chinook, as well as English and French.

I don't know where 'alki' originally came from, but its pronunciation in its original language is irrelevant, since it's pronounced /&lkai/ in Chinook Wawa.
[nq:1]I had originally assumed, based on the spelling, that the pronunciation should be /'&lki/, but, to my surprise, the pronunciation ... page, the original pronunciation was /&lki/. It was changed to /&lkaI/ during Prohibition, presumably because /&lki/ suggested "alkie" = alcoholic.[/nq]
That's a good story, and stranger things have happened, but it's at least suspicious, especially since 'I' was a usual way to spell /ay/ in Chinook Wawa (cf 'Siwash' /saywaS/).
[nq:1]I don't know whether all that is true. Someone who actually lived in or on Alki Beach and other parts ... be able to give us some firsthand information. Perhaps there is an AUE poster out there who fits that bill.[/nq]
I can certainly vouch for there being some lovely bars on Alki Beach; I had drinks there a month or so ago.
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler U Michigan Linguistics Dept "But do we know how to welcome into our mother tongue the distant echoes that reverberate in the hollow centers of words? When reading words, we see them and no longer hear them." Gaston Bachelar

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]Someone who actually lived in or on Alki Beach and ... might be able to give us some firsthand information.[/nq]
When I lived there for one summer in about 1930 (see http://tinyurl.com/5pqhr ), the only pronunciation I heard was ('&lkaI) *. In a recent year we went on a guided tour of Seattle, which included a drive through the Alki Beach area. The tour guide said ('&lkaI).
I recognized nothing about Alki Beach except the forested hill at some distance behind it that used to be in large part a park and probably still is. It's amazing how much things can change in a mere seventy years.
My older sister and I started on a hike in that park one day. When we were part way up the hill, she suddenly said "Run Bobby!", then turned around and ran all the way home with me as close behind her as I could manage. I didn't know why we were running, but when we got home she told me that under one of the steps on a stairway we had been about to ascend was a squirming mass of garter snakes.
I later learned that those snakes were harmless, but we didn't know it then.
* ((&) is my vowel in "cat"; (aI) is a conventional way to show the pronunciation of "eye", although my pronunciation is probably closer to (ai) or (Ai) or somewhere between them.)

Pronunciation of "Alki"

Top answer

Get the Weekly English Kit 📬

Related Questions