Boas 1892: Many discoveries in a short article (Part 11: an obscene meaning)
Reports of the death of mamuk were greatly exaggerated!
It would be silly beyond Mark Twain to think that Chinuk Wawa would ever give up one of the first words it learned…
https://www.jstor.org/stable/409299Image credit: imgflip
So, reports of the death of mamuk (meaning ‘do’ or ‘make’) have been greatly exaggerated, by none other than Dr. Franz Boas.
Pobody’s nerfect.
You could have said mamuk died out at Grand Ronde Indian Reservation, being replaced by munk. (And, by incorrect implication, by x̣íləməɬ.)
But Boas was apparently unaware of munk in 1892. The first time we see it in print is in Melville Jacobs’ 1932 brief description of Grand Ronde CW grammar. To which Boas reacted with disbelief in 1933!
Here’s what Dr. Boas reported in 1892, based on his work with (“Charles”) Cultee / Q’ltí of Bay Center, Shoalwater (“Willapa”) Bay, Washington state:
Mamook has acquired an obscene meaning, and is no longer in use on the Columbia River.
This is sort of accurate, in its way. The “obscene meaning” that mámuk (the full, stressed, original form of the verb, not the later munk) had taken on is pretty precisely given in the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary as ‘to cohabit’.
In my equally polite but more precise definition, that’s ‘copulate with; have sex with’.
I phrase it that way, because the word is by nature transitive in Chinuk Wawa. It appears to need a direct object real bad.
Unlike x̣íləməɬ ‘to work, i.e. to be working, laboring’. That other word carries along its original Lower Chehalis Salish sense of intransitivity, from the ‘Implied Transitive’ suffix –məɬ, No object allowed.
But anyway, mamuk remained in use in practically every sentence of Chinuk Wawa, certainly in its function as a “helping verb” prefix.
Bonus fact:
Surely Boas was hearing mamuk in constant use by Q’lti. So why did he claim it’s “no longer in use”?
This may have come up in a context where Boas tried asking Q’lti in Jargon, “nsayka mamuk kʰanumakwst ukuk san?” (‘Are we working together today?’)
You understand, from Boas’s journals, plus our own experience as field linguists, we know that it was necessary to check frequently whether a Native language speaker was free from their daily duties to talk with a researcher.
Q’lti may have burst out laughing, to the surprise and embarrassment of Boas, a European of refined manners.
Which would have led to the information that “we no longer say mamuk when we mean work“…
