Confirmed! “Picayune” was Chinuk Wawa
A word that I found in the Lushootseed Salish dictionary, s-pikyud, most likely is a survival from Chinuk Wawa.
The word represents English picayune, a coin technically worth 6.25 cents in the early United States. (Like much of our first money, it wasn’t minted here but was Spanish in origin.) If you haven’t heard of picayunes, it’s because they stopped circulating generations ago.
(Image credit: Etsy.com)
Confirmed!
I just found this in Father St Onge’s Chinook Jargon dictionary manuscript:
Nickel, a: sit-kom-mit, pikaiun
sit-kom-mit is ‘half a bit’; it’s old news to Jargon people that the frontier American ‘bit’ — formerly half a quarter, i.e. 12.5 cents — was actually a ‘dime’ of 10 cents.
This pikaiun being defined as a ‘nickel’ of 5 cents shows us that it was understood as the lowest-value silver coin then in use.
Interesting to see how the values of coins can fluctuate, along with the words denoting them.
Very interesting to keep on discovering new words of Chinuk Wawa.
Boom!
Wouldn’t it ultimately be from French “picaillon”, though?
You betcha, Louisiana Frencha, which had plenty of interaction with Spanish because of the history of the region.
Have you heard of the surviving dialect of colonial Canary Island Spanish in Louisiana? — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isleños_in_Louisiana
I had forgotten the French word picaillon, usually used in the plural. The TLFI says it meant a small coin struck in Savoy (then an Italian territory) in 1635 and almost immediately devaluated. So the meaning became “coin of very low value”: if you only had picaillons</i in your pocket you were very poor. The word is supposed to be from a Provençal (our perhaps rather Franco-Provençal) verb "pikkar" referring to the sound of coins hitting each other.
(Sorry about the extra italics)
Other topic: in sit-commit is sit a separately attested morpheme in Chinookan? If so does it mean “half”? do you have other examples of it?
No, this is just one of those 19th-century anglophone renderings of Native languages. Hyphens flying everywhere.
(That said, I am capable of coming up with a Tsamosan Salish etymology for “sitkum” that involves the native root sit(i) for “pass over”.) 🙂
Does “sitkumsaX” mean anything to you? It is a Nisqa’a word supposed to be from CJ (there are only a few in the language). I would like to know what you think before I tell you what it means.
The “saX” part throws me off.
But sitkum is OK? meaning what?
‘half, middle’
(assuming it is not from Tsamosan “pass over”)
Thanks, “half, middle” is what I was told. The whole word means ‘midday, noon’. It sounds bypically Nisqa’a but “sitkw” is not a word of the language (“m” is a linking morpheme in a compound). The last component “saX” recalls “sa, sah” ‘day’, but it means the same thing in another language (I can’t find the reference right now).
So, is “sitkum” from one of the Chinookan varieties? is it one morpheme or more than one?
“Sitkum” is said to be Chinookan. Impressionistically I’d say it has to be multimorphemic. Also impressionistically, it looks plausibly Salish 🙂
Bill Poser shared a Carrier- or Chilcotin-region Chinook Jargon prayer or hymn with me a few years ago that had some unexpected “gh” sounds in it. Your “X” in “sitkumsaX” reminds me of it.
That x thing in early Chinukwawa again… both finally and medial.
I’d like to learn more about other ambiguous or soft final consonants, such as the n appended to lhūchma.
Good! It’s a phenomenon that happened for various reasons with various words of Jargon. Plenty of investigating left to be done there…
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