A Wakashan+Tsamosan co-etymology?
Very possibly a chance coincidence — but sometimes we find the most amazing resemblances among Chinuk Wawa’s input languages…
I’ll keep this brief.
I noticed an intriguing similarity of sound & meaning between these 2 languages, separated by an imposing stretch of rough seacoast.
(Or by many days’ overland travel through several nations’ traditional territories.)
- Nuučaan’uł Wakashan of Vancouver Island, BC — and therefore possibly also in the “Nootka Jargon” pidgin — mayink meaning ‘(dancer) join in completing a circuit (around the fire)’.
- £əw’ál’məš Lower Chehalis Salish, the co-home language of the Lower Chinookans — məyín’ət/ɬ ‘sing’.
The latter word is reported by John Kaye Gill’s 1909 dictionary edition as an obscure lower Columbia River Chinuk Wawa verb < my-ee-na >, also misprinted as < ny-ee-na >, meaning ‘sing’.
It’s not known from other CW source documents, so it wouldn’t seem to have been widely used.
I lack information on the morphological structure of the Nuučaan’uł word. Maybe it’s related to a set of root-forms m’a, m’aa, m’ee having to do with ‘biting’ and the ‘Wolf Ritual’, and a seeming suffix -ink(ʷ) ‘together’. (Can any of my readers help there?)
(Likely a stray observation, but maybe that’s what I’m trafficking in today — that -ink(ʷ) ‘together’ has a pleasing resemblance to the Proto-Salish root that means ‘one; together’ among other things, and which I’ve proposed is part of the etymology of the word “Chinook”.)
The CW word’s limited occurrence in “the literature” tends to rule out any idea of its having come north via CW.
Could the resemblance be pure chance?
Or, could it be a loan in the reverse direction, southward to £əw’ál’məš?
Might the slippage between the meanings be explainable as a byproduct of long-distance transmission through many intermediaries?
Just tossing this out there to see some reactions.
I guess you got this from Stonham 2005:197. The example there is: mayinkšiʔaƛ hułiiʔiƛʔi, ‘those who were dancing joined together in a circle’. The root appears to be mink- (Sapir and Swadesh 1939:265: minkʷ-, minkʷaˑ ‘to encircle, circle about’), plus the plural infix -ay̓- (see Davidson 2002:208). Stonham’s citation form “mayink” misleadingly presents the bound root as if it were free, and fails to identify the infix.
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Woohoo, I’m so glad to get your much more informed view on this, Adam! So, are you saying there’s not a suffix -ink(ʷ) ‘together’ in this stem?
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Are there other infixes in NCN??
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Interesting how similar in sound, meaning, and placement this -ay̓- is to the PL infix in the neighbouring Salish languages!
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Suffixes. That’s right, I don’t think that the word mayinkšiƛ includes the suffix -inkʷ, -(č,kʷ)inkʷ ‘with’, although there is of course such a suffix in other words. From the meaning of the root mink(ʷ)- ‘circle’, it’s tempting to draw some deep etymological connection between the two morphs, but they are certainly not synchronically related.
Infixes. There are just a few infixes in Westcoast, most expressing plural meanings (see Davidson reference above). There is also a diminutive infix in some Nuuchahnulth dialects (-čk-), some purely phonological dummy codas that go with CV- roots in some forms, and a few special infixes used for imitating the speech of certain folktale characters (Sapir 1915, Abnormal Types of Speech in Nootka).
‘bite’. I think that you were onto something though, Dave, when you suggested a connection to m̓a- ‘bite’. In fact there is a word m̓a-čink-šiƛ, meaning ‘anniversary, birthday’. Compare the synonymous words ḥa-čink-šiƛ, ʔap-čink-šiƛ. These all have the same meanings and suffixes, just different roots, and are favored in different dialects.
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