Lumping splitting words…

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Franz Boas’s very fine “Chinook: An Illustrative Sketch” (1910) includes his student Edward Sapir’s summary…
…of “Diminutive and Augmentative Consonantism in Wishram“, i.e. a language closely related to the Shoalwater-Clatsop speech that Boas describes.
Sapir shows how most consonants of Kiksht (Wishram) Upper Chinookan, “as also without doubt of all other Chinookan dialects”, can systematically mutate to convey a sense of smallness or bigness. For example (put into Grand Ronde’s style of writing), you find i-c’hínun ‘eagle’ versus ił-t’sínun ‘bird’.
One Diminutive & Augmentative relation that Sapir doesn’t mention is pointed out by Boas elsewhere, for Lower Chinookan. There, he notices that /ł/ can connote largeness, and /ts/ smallness. which gives us the two interrelated Chinookan source words for the Jargon’s yúłqat ‘long’ and yútskat ‘short’.
Boas also notices that Lower Chinookan /t’ł/ and /t’s/ alternate in this way, e.g. between t’łə́x̣ ‘to split large planks’ and t’sə́x̣ ‘to split small pieces of wood’.
Sapir speaks mainly in terms of 3-way consonant sets (unmarked, Diminutive, and Augmentative), while Boas phrases things in terms of 2-way sets (Diminutive & Augmentative).
But the above observations got me thinking about a four-way Chinuk Wawa set of Chinookan-sourced words that I suspect are historically related to each other, expanding Boas’s sound correspondence even further:
- c’húx̣ ‘peeled or skinned off; chipped off, scraped’
- t’łə́x̣ ‘torn, ripped’
- úptsax̣ ‘knife’ (I’ve previously proposed a Chinookan ‘Instrumental’ prefix (u-)p- in the history of several Jargon words, which here would leave a root *-tsax̣ ~ ‘cut/split/tear/peel’)
- t’sə́x̣ ‘split’
The 2012 Grand Ronde Dictionary of CW notes a vague potential connection between c’húx̣ and t’sə́x̣, but I may be the first to point out that there’s decent evidence for a sound-symbolic relationship among /c’h/ and /t’ł/ (both of which can be the Augmentative), /ts/ (which would seem to be the neutral version), and /t’s/ (Diminutive) in the old language.
Maybe we can think of these as a scale of forcefulness, as much as of bigness vs. smallness?
In any case, we seem to have here a nice little illustration of a very distinctive trait in the grammar of the Chinookan languages that played such a major role in forming Chinuk Wawa.
We can keep our ears open for other possible relationships among CW words that sound similar to each other…
What do you think?
Really interesting!
delet tlosh kumtuks! naika tiki
Wow
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