kímtəks: not such a rarity, and not so new
One of the many delightful little mysteries of Chinook Jargon is a word that chup henli (Dr. Henry Zenk) turned up in his important research into Grand Ronde’s variety of Chinuk Wawa.
The 2012 Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde dictionary that resulted from his work includes this entry for that word:
kimtəks ‘to feel deeply about, regard with respect’
The stress indicated in that entry is always on the 1st syllable, which has a “long” /i/ as in English “machine”, not a “short i” as in English “Kim”. These facts will come back into play below…
Here are all of the examples given in CTGR 2012 (pages 114-115):
- nay kimtəks [Ø]
‘I’ve got it down in my heart (e.g., referring to what you just told me)’
[DDR: I’ve added in my notation for the “silent IT” pronoun] - nay kimtəks mayka
‘I’ll be thinking of you; you’ll be in my thoughts’ - kiiimtəks is called an “emphasis form” by the dictionary:
- na ɬatwa bət nay kiiimtəks mayka, kwansəm na kiiimtəks mayka
‘I’m leaving but you will definitely be in my thoughts, I’ll always be thinking of you’ - na kiiimtəks ɬaska
‘I have great respect for them’
- na ɬatwa bət nay kiiimtəks mayka, kwansəm na kiiimtəks mayka
The etymological comment in that dictionary:
This obscure word was recorded only from WB [tribal elder and council chairman, Wilson Stephen Bobb Sr.]; possibly, it traces to kəmtəks ‘know, understand’ (from Nootka Jargon), amplified by an elsewhere unrecorded lengthening of the first syllable.
The attribution of this word to the important NJ, and thus very early Chinook Jargon, form kə́mtəks has to be correct. But nothing in the Nuuchahnulth source language(s), nor in CJ, would suggest a shift to a front /i/ vowel.
The missing clue is this: I’ve found in Lower Chehalis Salish a frequent vowel shift from stressed schwa /ə́/ to /í/. Common words using this shift in Low. Cheh. include qíʔx̣əč̓ ‘crab’ (‘many hands’, derived from qə́x̣ ‘many’), and ʔalíʔsiɬ ‘children of royalty’ (derived from ʔál̓əs ‘chief’). This shift to /í/ seems to have 2 functions, which overlap each other to some extent: (1) to build compound words, broadly defined, and (2) to impart an ‘Affective’, special emotional tinge to a word.
And Lower Chehalis Salish was one of the first big contributors to the early Chinook Jargon, seeing as how Low. Cheh. was spoken by the same people who spoke Lower Chinookan in the far lower Columbia River villages where CJ originated.
So I trace Chinuk Wawa’s kimtəks to early Lower Chehalis influence. (I haven’t found the /ə́/ to /í/ shift so prominently in the sister SW WA Salish languages, by the way.)
It’s fascinating to see bits of Lower Chehalis grammar, such as this vowel shift, that got applied to a different language, CW. We see many hints of similar stuff going on in past centuries between Lower Chehalis and Lower Chinookan…
Anyway, it turns out that this form kimtəks indeed shows up earlier within CW. Here are a couple instances:
< caim-tux > / < kaim-tux > from Swan 1857 (Shoalwater Bay, Washington)
< káme-taks > from Gibbs 1863 (Fort Vancouver area of Washington and Oregon)
These spellings with English-style < ai > or “long” < a > indicate a phonetic [e], which is in fact an extremely common variant of /i/ in Lower Chehalis all the live-long day.
There’s a small irony in Grand Ronde having that lengthened “emphasis form” kiiimtəks. That’s because the /ə́/ to /í/ shift in Lower Chehalis, at least in function (2), is already the same thing as Chinuk Wawa’s lengthening of a word’s stressed vowel — it’s one way of adding rhetorical importance to a word.
Bonus fact:
The same word we’re talking about is used in a number of innovative ways by a speaker of revitalized southern Chinuk Wawa in a 2021 Indigenous People’s Day Proclamation from Multnomah County, Oregon.
For instance, it gets used in a causative form meaning ‘to honor’ someone, and also as a noun. That latter use is totally new to me, but the modern community has pretty firmly established kimtəks as ‘to honor’ someone, using it to make translations of ‘Mother’s Day’ and so forth.
And: kimtəks solchas hayash-san = Veterans Day. A modern coining, but has caught on locally.
I remain slightly nervous about dueling L Che vs L Chinook etymological proposals. It is too easy to project what one knows best onto messy data. I for my part have spent quite a bit of time and energy delving into the Chinookan sources, but have very little feeling for how Salish languages work. You on the other hand have a lot of experience with those languages. But hey, I have to admit that your proposal here seems pretty convincing. Especially with the historical evidence of varying pronunciation of that first syllable.
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hayu masi for adding your comment here, Henry!
I want to add that two-thirds of the sources on kímtəks are pretty strongly Lower Chehalis-associated. That is, one is James G. Swan telling of his years living on Shoalwater Bay in Low. Cheh. lands. The second is George Gibbs’s 1863 dictionary with its very frequent knowledgeable attributions of words to Low. Cheh., and precise comments on how widely they’re known — as if he was aware of a somewhat distinct style of Chinuk Wawa on the extreme lower Columbia. A post on this subject is in the queue to be published here on my site.
I definitely agree about the confirmation-bias effect in historical linguistics. As a self-warning, I often think of the person who suggests all African-American dialect and slang terms come from Wolof in West Africa. This is a reason why I try to mass-compare my Indigenous etymology suggestions re Chinuk Wawa items, checking all 4 SW Washington Salish languages and all 4 Chinookan languages. (Plus others such as K’alapuyan.) It’s laborious, but it gives a pretty decent sense of the larger patterns. E.g. there’s a strong tendency to find similar-looking roots shared between Lower Chinookan and Lower Chehalis and Cowlitz. And so forth.
Dave R.
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