Another early Chinuk Wawa grammaticalization?: mamuk-/munk-

(Image credit: @mamukfirenze on Twitter)
This one is ALMOST so obvious that we could miss it.
The pre-Chinuk Wawa word mamuk ‘to make/do’, from the “Nootka Jargon” of Vancouver Island area is obviously one of the earliest known words in CW. That’s to say it was documented first in “NJ”, and only afterwards in Chinuk Wawa.
It follows that this word’s adaptation — “grammaticalization” — from full verb to what I’ll call a Causative prefix in CW also happened early.
That prefix being mamuk-, and with phonological reduction typical of such things, munk- in Grand Ronde’s creole dialect.
This morning I’m finding that that’s not instantly demonstrable, since many of our earliest records of CW just list individual “words”. That format excludes complex structures, such as mamuk+root word.
And the handiest existing reference work that collects old sources together into timelines of CW forms (S.V. Johnson’s 1978 dissertation) only lists complex forms under their heads (basically their second word; the opposite approach from the more recent Grand Ronde dictionary). As a result, under mamuk we find kinds of ‘making/doing’ such as < kaltaj mamook > ‘bad work’, but not Causative forms like < mamuk-kaw > ‘to tie something up’.
So it’s mildly difficult to track down early examples of Causative mamuk-___.
But it can be done. For instance, one of the first documents having lots of full Chinuk Wawa sentences in it — and you can’t stick to the “individual words” approach if you’re saying sentences!! — is the “Chinook Dictionary, Catechism, Prayers and Hymns” book credited to Demers, Blanchet, and St. Onge. Published in 1871, its contents were evidently composed in the late 1830s, which gives us some nice early Jargon.
That little book’s dictionary lists things by part-of-speech, so you have to turn to the Verbs section. Pages 27 and 28 are pretty much chock full of mamuk- Causatives: < mamuk elaHan > ‘to help’, < mamuk iakesilH > ‘to sharpen’, etc. etc. Dozens of examples.
Nothing in the documentary record of Chinook Jargon suggests that Demers & Co. spoke weird.
All signs indicate that this mamuk- Causative formation was strongly established in everyone’s CW speech quite early on.
Well now, there you have your timing more or less resolved.
What about the source? We always have to think about where a Chinuk Wawa form came from — not just its etymology (in this case from Nootka Jargon), but the inspiration, the idea behind it. In the present case, I have no reason to think that Nootka Jargon used mamuk in this way; I think I’ve detected a couple of compound words in NJ, but nothing like evidence for a Causative formation.
So, which other languages might’ve inspired it? We turn as usual to the 4 main contributors that were on the scene in early Chinuk Wawa days: French, Salish, English, and Chinookan.
- French has a somewhat frequent similar “make” construction, as in faire du camping ‘to go camping’. But it doesn’t seem to be productive — I believe you can’t slap any old word you want after faire and expect it to be an accepted compound verb. You do have common expressions like Elle s’est fait comprendre ‘She made herself understood / She made clear’, but in my understanding those aren’t so much about a productively formed compound (faire comprendre) as about an idiomatic phrase.
- Salish has Causative-type forms. A couple kinds come to mind, for the local Southwest Washington Salish. First, there’s what I take as a compound, where a root saʔ ‘to make’ is followed by a noun stem, typically giving you a noun. (So the place name Satsop is literally like ‘it makes a stream’.) Second, there’s a true verbal Causative suffix -st, which is freely usable on all kinds of predicates, so it’s comparable with the distribution of mamuk- in Chinuk Wawa.
- English can combine “make” with a following word, but as with French, this typically amounts to either an idiomatic phrase such as “make do” or “make fun of”, or else a simple sum-of-the-parts where each element holds onto its lexical meaning as in “make bread” or “make a canoe”. The more Causative sense in “make (someone do something)” is pretty restricted, in that it’s only one of several modal constructions of compulsion — there’s also “force”, “have”, “cause”, and so on. So that “make” is probably not of sufficient frequency in casual speech to have ever influenced Chinuk Wawa.
- Chinookan has one Causative-type formation that’s of sky-high frequency, and it’s comparable in its semantics to mamuk- Causatives. Probably the most common verb root in Chinookan languages is -x ‘to make/to to’, and it’s used in hundreds of examples I find in Franz Boas’s “Chinook Texts” (1894). I’m particularly thinking of the common formation where Chinookan uses a “particle” (ideophone, onomatopoeia, what have you; a lot of these became common words of Chinuk Wawa) + an inflected form of this verb. as in ɬáqʷ ačía-x̣ ‘he took it out’ (out he.it-made).
Take the above picture all together and it sure looks like Native languages pass the DNA test much better than European ones.
Chinuk Wawa’s mamuk- Causative seems more Chinookan than anything to me, at least in the impressionistic sense of being a single form and often using words that we also recognize in Chinuk Wawa.
Keep in mind, though, that the local Salish -st is of comparable flexibility, and my readers will recall that I’ve lately traced a number of other grammatical formations in CW specifically to Salish.
Without having to specify a source language, I think we’ve once again found that the grammar of Chinook Jargon formed under primarily Native guidance.
My spontaneous reaction: why look for a model for this in the input languages? It looks like a very “pidginy” thing to do, in that you get more mileage our of your limited vocabulary. So it would seem that your’re making the same mistake as most contact linguists make: everything in the contact language needs to come from somewhere, whereas in fact, pidgins abound with stuff that is clearly independent of what the input had to offer.
But then again, a mystery (to me) about pidgins in general is why light verb constructions specifically aren’t more common than they are. Probably no pidgin has as much of this as CJ (with, probably, Gulf Pidgin Arabic as a distant second). So for whatever it’s worth even I am with you on this one. 🙂
🙂 I like your comments! You’re absolutely right that “make” is probably the most common source of Causative grammaticalizations, not just in pidgin-creoles, but crosslinguistically. (I have a sense that Heine & Kuteva and others will back this up; I didn’t do a literature search on it this morning.)
But looking at this from the other end, I was interested in whether any of the “lexifier” languages are particularly UNlikely models. My thought experiment today sways me toward thinking something I’ve never thought of before: that Indo-European languages (and the highly I-E influenced Nootka Jargon) are a less convincing model for Chinuk Wawa’s mamuk-. (“Light verb construction” is a fair label; I’ve been mulling it since recently reading a grammar of a West African Creole English.)
There’s also the generalization that a good number of Chinuk Wawa grammatical features that I’ve been examining seem more than coincidentally parallel to things we find in Salish (and some in Chinookan). That adds a little to an argument that mamuk- as well is Native-modeled.
PS: John Ball’s ca. 1832 vocabulary (“Manuscript 195” in George Lang’s “Making Wawa” book) contains 2 expressions that might qualify among the earliest mamuk- Causative/light-verb examples known: < marmook pire > ‘make the fire’ and < marmook pire stick > ‘get fire wood’.
I think Mikael’s point about over-“sourcing” everything is well taken, but on these mamuk/munk causative/serial/auxiliaries you feel right to me in pointing toward the “guidance”of Native languages underlying early CW. Those in CW not feel particularly French to me, not even what Valdman called français avancé. Given how much idiomatic meaning is present in verb+noun collocations world-wide, the fact that they appear in early pidgin-creoles is indeed evidence of grammaticalization. Let us also remember that there were children language learners already present in Fort Vancouver when Demers arrived and started collecting items, as by Ball’s time too.
I should say once again that my essays such as today’s are parts of an insight that I’ve been developing, that while etymologies are easy enough (and plenty remain to be researched in Chinuk Wawa), the sources of more than phonological forms can be figured out if we try. Patterns of grammar in a contact language can’t be written off as being due to universals of language (or to rules of pidginization/creolization, startlingly few of which have turned up in our research), nor can they be automatically assumed to be attributable to source languages. (I prefer that term to “substrate” and “superstrate”, which seem not always applicable, and “adstrate” just means a participant language in the contact situation.) We have to weigh the evidence. And in the case of Chinuk Wawa, the evidence newly includes an entire language (Lower Chehalis Salish) that went undescribed till now, but was spoken in the same villages as Lower Chinookan, in fact serving as Chinookans’ pre-“contact” lingua franca. So there is a lot of data that needs a hearing.
The Chinook language was put together by the canucks. Their society was failing. In the 1600s we were trading with the different tribes by using the language we put together. The language also instilled in time the will to move forward which we called la survivance
Hi Maurice, thanks for commenting here. The canadiens played an enormously important role in shaping Chinuk Wawa, although I’m at pains to say CW existed before francophones were present in the Pacific NW! Dave