Quinault ‘to gamble with a bone or stick’

Here’s a Chinuk Wawa and/or Lower Chinookan loan word in Quinault Salish that I’d missed before!

Quinault bone gaming (image credit: Thurston Talk)

Quinault has ~ x̣íɬəkʷəm̓ ‘to gamble with a bone or stick’. (I often mark my Quinault phonologized forms with “~” to show that I’m approximating based on the often-inaccurate writing system in the 1971 dictionary.)

A suffix –əm̓ can signal a verb in that language, but, this word looks tremendously similar to:

Chinuk Wawa’s íɬukuma / íɬəkum ‘the bone-in-the-hand gambling game’.

Some further background:

That CW word came from Lower Chinookan íɬukuma, which I tend to analyze slightly differently from the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary, as í-ɬuk-ma. 

That is, it looks to me like…

• a Collective Plural (-ma) 
• of a Masculine Noun (i-)
• based on the root ɬuk. That root, perhaps, is related to Chinookan particle and Chinuk Wawa word ɬúk ‘broken’.

So conceivably íɬukuma in Chinookan literally meant ‘the set of broken pieces’. Would that be the set of “bones” used as playing pieces?

“Bone”us fact:

Also in Quinault, we can perhaps compare ~ ɬux̣ə́lam ‘bone used for gambling’. That one’s similar enough in shape to íɬukuma to compel my interest. But I can’t analyze it so easily. If it’s also from Chinookan — and there are historically a good number of Chinookan speakers at Quinault Indian Reservation — it may start with the Neuter Noun prefix (ɬ-). (The word perhaps starts with ɬə, a normal variant of ɬ-, rather than with ɬu.) More or less equally probable to me at the moment is an etymology relating to the well-known Chinook Jargon word (s)lahal, ‘stick game, bone game’ plus that Salish verb suffix -əm.

Neither of these Quinault words is related to the basic SW WA Salish word for ‘bone’, by the way.

t’ɬúnas-ɬáksta kə́mtəks!
Who the heck knows!

qʰata mayka təmtəm?
What do you think?