‘Flag’ in Tsimshian & hidden Chinook Jargon (and English) (and Salish)
Nisga’a Tsimshian flag (image credit: Wikipedia)
Sometimes you spot one odd-looking thread sticking out, pull on it, and find it was an important part of the cloth.The cloth in this instance is flags.
From whatever evidence I can find, flags appear to be a European innovation in the Pacific Northwest. So, when I find a word for ‘flag’ in an Indigenous language, I tend to take a second look, expecting a story to be behind it.
This happened when I was reading through some published Tsimshian (northern British Columbia coast) material. I apologize in advance for my inability to distinguish among the “Tsimshian” languages. There, I found two spellings of the same expression:
- ‘flag (European)’: atloʹm (1) gyamuk (2)
= sail (1) sun (2)
(Franz Boas – “Vocabularies of the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian Languages”, 1892, page 197) - ‘flag’: hahloam gyamg
= hahloa ‘cloth’ + a suffix -m that I’m ignorant about + gyamg ‘month, sun, heat, to be hot, warm’
(Sealaska Heritage Institute’s online “Dictionary of Shm’algyack“)
A similar compound in Tsimshian is hahloamboad ‘sailboat’ (‘cloth/sail + boat’), written as a single word. (‘Bót’ is a Chinuk Wawa word.)
The Tsimshian expression for ‘flag’ was definitely inspired by Chinuk Wawa sánti-síl ‘Sunday (implicitly: any celebration)-cloth’. That phrase is not known at Grand Ronde, but is reported as < Sunday sail > in George C. Shaw’s 1909 dictionary and JK Gill’s dictionary, at least in the edition of that same year.
However, Tsimshian speakers couldn’t have taken ‘Sunday-cloth’ straight from Chinook Jargon. Instead, it’s clear they must’ve gotten it via a simultaneous understanding that it contains (originally) English words. That is, the Tsimshian ‘flag’ term…
- separates the Jargon < Sun- > part (which you may know is also Jargon, where it means both ‘sun’ and ‘day’!!)
- from the < -day > part, which isn’t a Jargon word (there, it only occurs in borrowed English day names)
So it’s as if Tsimshian speakers of Chinuk Wawa understood ‘Sun[-]day’ as a redundant expression meaning ‘sun-sun’ or ‘day-day’. And then they made it more sensible, reducing it just to ‘day’!
My intuition is prodding me to think whether the above is another indicator of the known historical weakness of Chinook Jargon’s presence in Tsimshian territory…
…for instance, contrast this ‘Sunday sail’ stuff with Tsimshian’s own expression for ‘Sunday’: Ha’li Shgwaitg / Ha’li Shgwaitga Sha — from ha’li ‘upon’, shgwaitg ‘to rest’, sha ‘cloud, day’. In other words, a Protestant missionary-inspired phrase, ‘day on which to rest; day of rest’. (Maybe this Tsimshian expression inspired Alaskan Haida án sáanjuudaa sangáay, which has the same literal and actual meanings.) Not a borrowed Chinook word.
So much for Tsimshian and flags. Scroll past this picture for “page 2”.
Artist’s conception of a sailing ship with flags on a Sunday (image credit: Wikipedia)
Now check this out, for a bonus tidbit:
George C. Shaw’s 1909 Chinook Jargon dictionary, and Edward Harper Thomas’s 1935 dictionary, give the similar but expanded phrase, < hyas Sunday sail > (‘big Sunday cloth’), for ‘flag’.
But, I suggest that what < hyas Sunday sail > is based on is the early expression (known at least as far back as the influential 1853 Columbian newspaper vocabulary of lower Columbia Jargon), < hyass Sunday > (literally ‘big Sunday’) ‘Christmas; July 4th’.
Traces of ‘big Sunday’ survive as náw-santi, a loan-translation (calque) from Jargon into the Salish languages of that same region:
- in Lower Chehalis = ‘big time, big gathering’
- in Lower Cowlitz = ‘holiday, Christmas, July’
- in Upper Chehalis = ‘Fourth of July, Independence Day’
For you Syntax 101 students, this means I’m suggesting a parse of the 3-word phrase for ‘flag’ as [[hyas Sunday] sail] ([cloth [of big occasions]]).
I’m arguing against a parse as *[hyas [Sunday sail]] ([big [flag]]).
Also, you should quit Syntax class and document endangered languages instead.
Furthermore, I will bet you a pint of ooligan oil that < hyas Sunday sail > was the original, older expression. It makes more sense than — but would’ve been gradually reduced to — the newer < Sunday sail >. Repeated use tends to shorten spoken forms.
As it turns out, the longer phrase’s existence in Chinuk Wawa is also reflected in a Salish loan-translation. (Lower) Cowlitz has such a word for ‘flag’, náw’-sán’ti-m’n (literally ‘big-Sunday-thing.for.doing’, the idea being ‘what’s used for making holidays/celebrations’).
Lower Cowlitz alternatively says just sán’ti-m’n (literally ‘Sunday-thing.for.doing’), the same word as in neighbouring Upper Chehalis Salish. And that’s a direct “calque” on the shorter Jargon expression, < Sunday sail >.
I have a speculation why those two languages use the ‘thing.for.doing’ suffix for ‘cloth’ in their ‘flag’ words. (Instead of the Jargon loan sil that they use elsewhere, as in Cowlitz’s síl-aličn ‘cloth bag’.) Maybe they used to have a native Salish word for European-style cloth, like their close relative Quinault has — which I understand as literally ‘cover-thing.for.doing’.
So maybe Cowlitz & Chehalis people held onto that conceptual pattern, mentally translating the Jargon’s < (hyas-)Sunday sail > as ‘(big-)Sunday-thing.for.doing’.
TSIMSHIAN WORDS: Your examples appear to be in Coast Tsimshian but the spellings are all over the place, reflecting several different attempts at orthography. You may be able to access CT data in more standardized spellings in the First Voices online dictionary.
FLAG: The word is probably modern CT haLóom gyamk (L should have a / through it to indicate a lateral fricative). The Nisga’a equivalent (which I know much better and is usually easier to analyze) is hahlo’om hloKs (here I use K to indicate a uvular stop; hl is the fricative).
– Analysis: Nisga’a hahlo’o “sail”, -m “linking suffix in a phrase”, hloKs “sun/moon”. The word for ‘sail’ analyses as ha- “used for”, a prefix forming nouns for tools, utensils, instruments, etc, hlo’o “to be moved by an external force” (eg pushed, shoved, slid, etc) (also used as plural of ‘walk’). So the sail is the instrument that causes the boat to be pushed (by the wind).
– In Tsimshian the word for “sun” is gyamk, the cognate of Nisqa’a gamk (same pronunciation) meaning “hot, warm”.
– John Dunn, who wrote the first modern CT dictionary, treated compound words (very common in Tsimshianic) as single words and rarely offered an analysis. For Nisga’a I write most of them analytically, as here.
SUNDAY: Protestant missionaries on the coast created words for days of the week as well as for many post-contact items.
– Nisga’a Sunday is han’iisgwaay’tkw “day to rest on”, with han’ii- a compound prefix from ha- (see above) and n’ii- “on” (cognate with Tsimshian l’ii- “on”). Words or phrases referring to time do not normally use an equivalent of English “on”, but the compound prefix ha-n’ii- / ha-l’ii= is also used for furniture, paper and other items where ‘on’ has a concrete meaning, as in N han’iit’aa “chair” (t’aa “to sit (sg)’).
– The Tsimshian “sha” (Nisga’a sa, older sah) ‘day’ does not seem to be used in Nisga’a as a reinforcement for a day name. (Pronunciation note: Like many languages of the area, the Tsimshianic languages do not make a phonemic difference between “s” and “sh”, which can vary between speakers and even within individual speech – in English as well – so modern spellings usually use just “s”).
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