‘Full’ + Noun = ‘full of Noun’, from Lower Chinookan
The Chinuk Wawa way of saying ‘full of X’ is another structure that we can trace back to Chinookan.
(Image credit: wasdalex.co.uk)
CW says pʰáɬ X (literally ‘full X’) for ‘full of X’.
(Incidentally, I suspect pʰáɬ to be a very old Salish loan into Chinookan, long before it came into CW.)
Take a look at what Shoalwater-Clatsop Lower Chinookan says:
‘full their house meats, full grease their house’ (‘their house was full of meat and of tallow’) — 1894:22 (31)
I found roughly a hundred further examples of this structure in Boas’s “Chinook Texts”.
I see the same prepositionless structure in Kiksht Upper Chinookan, so I take it as native to the entire Chinookan language family.
It can be contrasted with, of course, the English and French inputs to CW, which use a preposition (‘full of X‘, ‘plein de X’).
And based on the little information we have from SW Washington Salish, those languages also seem to have used a preposition for this expression, cf. Quinault:
ləč’-s xatá ʔə t lə́m
full-3rd.person that.one of some alcohol
‘he’s full of rum’
A tangential comment — this Quinault sentence is obviously making a conscious, literal translation from Chinuk Wawa pʰáɬ-lám (literally ‘full of alcohol’) into Salish! Quinault also has the typical native SW WA Salish terms for drunkenness, one literally meaning ‘spinning eyes’ and the other a short, sweet word for intoxicated.
Anyway, Chinuk Wawa’s construction that says ‘full X’ to express ‘full of X’ looks to be a specifically Chinookan inheritance.
