míməlus(t) as a noun, and linguistic anthropology
Thanks to Coquelle Thompson of Siletz, we can clarify a gap in our knowledge of Chinuk Wawa.
A Chinook cemetery, but in Alberta (image credit: Findagrave)
Mr. Thompson told a CW story about “The Origin of Death” to researcher Melville Jacobs, who published it in 1936.
The speaker was around 90 years of age at the time, and still a mighty good speaker. There are in fact a couple of mildly puzzling details in his Jargon story, but not enough to call into question his fluency. If anything, I imagine he was just a bit rusty, because outside of Grand Ronde, in the 1930s it had become uncommon to speak CW.
One novelty in Thompson’s CW that testifies to his fluency and teaches us something valuable is his use of the word míməlus as a noun.
If you open up your copy of the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary, you’ll find míməlust, in their preferred spelling, is documented in that community as a verb and as an adjective. (I might now combine those under a label ‘stative verb’, but that’s not at issue today.) This word is not depicted as a noun at GR.
But a couple things within that dictionary entry itself give indirect evidence for míməlus(t) being a noun.
- The compound form míməlust-íliʔi is shown for ‘cemetery’. Besides this, I’ve shown a number of times on this website that the same phrase is very old in Jargon as a term for traditional Native burial islands. By the grammatical rules of CW as I understand them, this compound must contain a CW noun míməlust ‘dead person’.
- The etymology of CW míməlust is shown to be a Chinookan noun meaning ‘the dead; corpses; ghosts’.
This sketch of the evidence is enough, I think, to show that Coquelle Thompson’s noun míməlus ‘dead person’ is actually straight Chinuk Wawa.
I think it’s sort of unremarkable that the word for ‘corpse’ went unrecorded for so many decades despite the Jargon’s long bibliography of published dictionaries.
In real life, we much more often talk about and remember someone ‘dying’ (a verbal concept) than about their ‘dead body’ (a noun), with which we only briefly engage.
It seems to me that all human cultures find corpses stressful, even traumatic, to deal with; people have an easier time noting the sheer fact of someone’s life ending.
My anthropologist readers should feel invited to contribute their two cents here…
No quarrel with your logic. Evidently, Coquelle Thompson and perhaps others used miməlus(t) as a noun: ‘dead person’. But still strikes me as an odd usage. I heard miməlust-tilixam from Grand Ronde elder speakers, never miməlust by itself for that meaning.
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And this from the Demers catechism (p 39): . I am inclined to read as ‘those who are dead’; but I suppose someone else might translate ‘the dead ones’.
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Hey, what happened to the text from Demers that was part of that last comment? I enclosed it in wedge brackets, and it simply disappeared. So, minus wedge brackets: “Kopa alke weĥt iaka chako pus nanich okuk mitwhit telikom pi okuk memelust.” So my observation about that was: I am inclined to read “okuk memelust” as ‘those who are dead’; but I suppose someone else might read ‘the dead ones’.
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Beware of using angled brackets online! Browsers tend to interpret them as markers of HTML code, which is supposed to be hidden from human eyes, for convenience.
Here’s the one and only example in Coquelle Thompson’s story that forces me into the “miməlus(t) as noun” interpretation (which I think we’d have arrived at by some means anyway) — I’ve put it into the spellings that I use for teaching the more BC style of Jargon — Coyote Jim says:
“Yakwaa
“Here
maika wawa tilikum k’ilapai, pos kwinum sun
are you saying people will return, so that on the fifth day
mimaloos k’ilapai?”
the dead will come back?”
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I agree that it’s easiest and it’s sensible to interpret your Demers examples as ‘…who have died’. The majority of examples of the word work this way.
A related factor in my interpretation of Coquille Thompson is his unusual pattern of using “ukuk” by itself as an animate pronoun, ‘that person’. I count 3 cases of that in his “Origin of Death” story, enough to make me take seriously the differences between his “okok”, “okok mimaloos”, and “mimaloos”.
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