How to say honeybee in Chinook Jargon
Happy New Year! I love getting these quick little research questions from my readers!
Someone asked me “how to say honeybee in Chinook Jargon”:
The Grand Ronde Chinuk Wawa dictionary has this for ‘bee’–
- ántʰiyeł (which originally was a Kalapuya word for ‘wasp’)
That word is first found quite early, in Father Lionnet’s word list from the 1830s.
And for the delectable product of this bug’s labor, GRCW adds–
- ántʰiyeł məlásis
- ántʰiyeł yaka məlásis
- məlásis (which started life as ‘molasses’)
Another source gives “klemahun opoots“, literally ‘stab tail’, but I can’t vouch for the source of that phrase.
ántʰiyeł “the Kalapuya word for ‘wasp'”
I have been studying some Kalapuya. The initial an- is a kind of prefix/article and -tʰiyeł has some cognates in other languages suggesting that the root or stem means ‘sting’. I am just wondering about the aspirated t. Is it Kalapuya or Wawa? Do you have a source?
LikeLike