Ikta Dale McCreery yaka t’ɬap (Part 1)
This mini-series is meant to highlight the fascinating stuff my BC Michif friend & colleague Dale McCreery finds and shares from the people meets in the Bella Coola area.
Which one is her mother-in-law? Image credit: Wikipedia
The material I’ll highlight will all come from the Facebook Chinook Jargon group, which I urge you to join.
On December 16, 2020, Dale posted:
I found a statement – a woman’s name was alhtsimliikw kakwa yaka mama and I thought this meant her name was like her mom’s, but later I get the impression that this actually meant alhtsimliikw‘s mother-in-law… does this make sense?
Let me (David Robertson here) note that alhtsimliikw is someone’s Nuxalk Salish name.
If I didn’t know any different, I would automatically understand the phrase Dale quotes in the same way he first did: that it meant her name is ‘alhtsimliikw like her mother’ — that is, that she’s named alhtsimliikw just the same as her mother was named that.
But Dale reports that the expression is actually telling us this person is alhtsimliikw‘s mother-in-law. Which is very cool. Because we don’t have much documentation of words for ‘mother-in-law’ in Chinuk Wawa.
So the way that this phrase can make sense to me personally is as a synonym of a more common word-order: kakwa alhtsimliikw yaka mama, that is, ‘(she’s) like alhtsimliikw‘s mother’.
It’s perfectly okay in the Jargon to have varying word orders, when it comes to expressions of possession. M yaka mama is far and away the most common word order for expressing ‘M’s mother’.
By extension, they’ll typically say kakwa M yaka mama for ‘like M’s mother’.
But many times, I’ve found examples of fluent Chinook Jargon speakers preserving the “discourse prominence” or “topicality” of any human beings who are being talked about. They do this by keeping the mention of that person right up front at the start of the sentence. One example of this is that you could also say yaka mama M, having the same meaning: ‘M’s mom’. This keeps ‘her mom’ in focus.
Likewise preserving the prominence of a human being that you’re talking about, you can say M kakwa yaka mama, literally ‘M, like her mom’, but just meaning ‘like M’s mom’. Here, you’re keeping M in focus, rather than her mom.
I’m keeping this discussion short, but it probably already feels way too complicated!
Here’s the secret — this magic with keeping a person “up front and in focus” really only happens in the flow of conversation.
So, I bet you’d never hear this person casually named as alhtsimliikw kakwa yaka mama, for example in answer to a sudden question of ‘What’s that lady called?’
And, I bet you’d never find alhtsimliikw kakwa yaka mama turning into a Nuxalk family name — unlike simpler Chinook expressions (less complicated noun phrases) along the lines of shanti-man ‘song-leader’ or tayi ‘chief’, which really have become surnames in the Pacific NW.
