Native metaphor: FAST ~ ABILITY
Get it? (Image source: btulp.com)
qʰáta máyka tə́mtəm? Observe…
Chinuk Wawa √áyáq (√ = a root; 2 accent marks = freely variable stress)
- ‘fast’
- at Grand Ronde (possibly a particle): ‘can, able to’
Lower Chinookan (Franz Boas’s “Sketch” sees the following as adverbs ( 1910:634))
- aiʹaq ‘quickly’
- aiʹaq ‘can’
Upper Chehalis Salish
- √x̣áxʷ ‘be fast’
- √x̣áxʷ-s (-s ‘Subjunctive’, so literally, ‘might be fast’) ‘can; able to’
Cowlitz Salish
- √ƛ̓ə́x̣- ‘fast, quick, soon’
- √ƛ̓ə́x̣-ɬ (-ɬ ‘Intransitive Perfective’) ‘can’
Quinault Salish
- √lá•l (I think the second “L” is a reduplication from the first one) ‘fast’
- la- ‘can; able to’
Neighboring languages:
Quileute Chimakuan: ‘can, able’ is expressed instead with ‘know how to’, according to Woodruff and Powell’s dictionary.
Ichishkíin (Yakama) Sahaptian: referring to Beavert & Hargus’s dictionary and Jansen’s dissertation grammar sketch, I find no obvious connection between ‘quick’ and ‘can’.
Summarizing so far, I’m seeing a Native metaphor that’s “areal” — shared among unrelated languages throughout a geographical region.
That region is one that we here have noticed many times before, where structures are held in common along the lower Columbia River between Chinookan, Salish, and the pidgin-creole Chinuk Wawa.
(Creole CW is located at Grand Ronde across the river. But the evidence suggests an old metaphor from the north bank.)
Other languages of SW Washington/lower Columbia River: I’d love to hear whether they use the QUICK ~ ABLE metaphor. We don’t have much information on the Dene (Athabaskan) languages there, but maybe K’alapuyan and Molala experts can say something.
qʰáta máyka tə́mtəm?
“Quick-thinking!”
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So Quileute “can’t” distinguish between can=permitted by circumstances/availability of means; and can=have requisite knowledge/innate ability? The latter sense is rendered by kəmtəks in Chinuk Wawa.
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I would bet Quileute can make some such distinctions. It’s a while since I read Andrade’s grammar outline, but I imagine e.g. an affixal indication of potential is likely to also be present.
As for Chinuk Wawa’s kə́mtəks, it’s of interest that that word got well on the way to grammaticalizing as a habitual-aspect marker in the lower Columbia region and Grand Ronde. There’s plenty of forms with it in St Onge’s ms. (interestingly I don’t notice it in Demers’s dictinonary/catechism book), and a good number in you guys’s dictionary. Extremely neat!
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