Another Indigenous language that preserves old Chinuk Wawa’s name for “Saturday”
There’s this one interesting word in Lower Chehalis Salish…
Image credit: A Kids Book A Day
…well, of course, there are thousands of them.
But right now let’s focus on the word that the Reverend Myron Eells wrote as paʹn-hû-laltc,
…which Professor Franz Boas re-elicited with the speaker Q’ltí a.k.a. Charles Cultee, writing it as pāʹnqe̳lāl̥c,
…translating this as ‘Saturday’,
…with a comment by Q’lti putting a literal meaning onto it of “give food”.
More literally, this word contains:
- the prefix pan(‘)- meaning ‘the time of/for…’,
- plus a root x̣ə́l(‘) that normally means ‘work’
(it’s in the Lower Chehalis-sourced Chinuk Wawa word x̣íləməł ‘work’), - and then a suffix that I haven’t yet analyzed.
(It might be a suffix new to me that I can understand as approximately equivalent to Chinook Jargon kʰapa mə́kʰmək, ~ ‘for food’.)
We can compare this with a word from hundreds of miles to the south, seʔe•ts ‘Saturday; to distribute’ (e.g. food) in the unrelated Klamath language.
Both of these trace to a Chinuk Wawa term recorded in the dictionary of George Gibbs 1863:24-25, muckamuck sun = mə́kʰmək-sàn = ‘food-day’.
This Jargon phrase, we’re told, is how folks referred to Saturdays at fur-trade era Fort Vancouver: The end of the work week, when (presumably in the PM!) employees were given their & their families’ food supply for the upcoming week.
