“tuməch” in Chinuk Wawa
A charming multifunctional loan from the kind of English that was spoken around Native people in 1890s British Columbia is “too much”…it leads us to much insight into Grand Ronde’s Jargon, too.
😏 (image credit: deepstash)
Proof that this really is a pidginization of the original English expression includes the fact that it’s used with different syntax in Jargon, including uses that the phrase doesn’t have in English.
Here’s a collection of occurrences of the word spelled tuməch in the Kamloops Wawa newspaper.
Here I take it as a noun:
Mamuk kanamokst ukuk klaska tuməch.
‘Gather together those leftovers of theirs.’
— KW #17a, page 66
Here it looks like a stative verb ‘to be left over; to be extra’:
…pus
‘for’klaska mash kopa barns < “barns” > ukuk xwit pi ukuk xlwima
‘them to put into barns that wheat and that other’makmak iaka tumətsh, pi klaska tlus nanitsh ukuk…
‘food that was left over, and (for) them to take care of it…’
— KW #25b, page 44
In the next 2 examples, it’s an adverb ‘to an excessive degree’, modifying a verb:
Ayu tilikom aiak mimlus kopa tuməch tiki tlap chikmin,
‘A lot of people die early from too much wanting to get money,’tuməch pli, tuməch mamuk shim kopa ukuk ilihi.
‘too much playing around, too much doing shameful things in this life.’
— KW #65, page 28
ST iaka patlach tomtom kopa nsaika pus nsaika kwanisim
‘God gave us a heart so that we’d always’trai pus ilo masashi tolo nsaika, pus nsaika fait kopa
‘try not to be beat by evil, so we’d fight against’saliks tomtom, kopa lisi tomtom, kopa tuməch aias tiki
‘(having) an angry heart, against a lazy heart, against too much lusting after’tilikom pi tuməch aias tiki iktas kopa ukuk ilihi.
‘people and too much loving material things in this life.’
— KW #66, page 31
And here it marks the excessive degree of an adjective (a stative one) —
Kimta iaka kawnt
‘Later he counted’iaka chikmin, pi iaka nanich kopit < 50 > tawsan
‘his money, and he saw it was only $50,000’iaka tala kopa iht sno, pi iaka tomtom
‘that he had from one year, and he thought’iaka tuməch klahawiam pus mitlait kopa
‘he was too poor to live in’ukuk ilihi, kakwa iaka iskom poison, pi
‘this world, so he took poison, and’iaka mimlus.
‘he died.’
— KW #152, page 75
‘Too much’ (the concept) is highly variable from one dialect, and one time period, to another in Chinuk Wawa.
Only in BC have I found tuməch.
(It’s no coincidence that in BC we also find mor creeping into CW, also from locally spoken English.)
I’m always delighted to point out the previous Jargon authorities’ lack of recognition of “nulls”.
So compare the merely implicit expression of “too much’ in the renowned JK Gill 1909 15th edition…in other words, there’s no word for ‘too much’ in Gill’s Jargon:
– Ikt dolla.
– ‘One dollar.’– Hy’as markook…
– ‘That is too much…’ (Literally ‘It’s expensive/a high price.’)
— page 78
…klaska mamook hiyú stick alta.
‘…too much logging.’ (Literally ‘…they do a lot of logs now.’)
— page 80
To simply imply ‘too much’ by using a “scalar” expression — a state of things that logically can occur in both lesser and greater degrees — is a time-honored strategy that’s at the core of all Chinuk Wawa dialects. I infer that it’s extremely old by the standards of this young language. It was probably the only means of expressing ‘too much’ in the earliest years of CW.
Somewhat later, I suspect, came the words/bits that explicitly, but quite broadly, label “a great degree”: íləp from SW Washington Salish and mánaqi from Lower Chinookan. When I call these broad, I mean that they express both the comparative degree (as in ‘bigger, better, stronger’) and the superlative degree (as in ‘biggest, best, strongest’). These examples would be indistinguishable, except from context clues, so you’d have:
- íləp-háyásh, íləp-ɬúsh, íləp-skúkum
‘bigger/biggest, better/best, stronger/strongest’, and likewise: - mánaqi-háyásh, mánaqi-ɬúsh, mánaqi-skúkum
‘bigger/biggest, better/best, stronger/strongest’.
But at that stage of things you still couldn’t say ‘too big, too good, too strong’ except in ways that sounded identical to what we’ve already shown above.
Presumably latest of all in Chinuk Wawa came the dedicated “excessive degree” marker from local tribal Chinookan in Grand Ronde CW, t’úx̣əlq’a, so that it was finally possible to say ‘too…’, e.g. t’úx̣əlq’a-háyú ‘too much’.
I say this was a relatively recent innovation because it’s only known from the Grand Ronde reservation, which can be called the latest-established CW-speaking community. Exactly as we find with the newer loans in the northern dialect (which tend to come from English), newer terminology at Grand Ronde tends to be more precise than any previously existing ways of saying the same thing in this language.
So northern tuməch (written as tumyuch in BC’s Chinuk Pipa alphabet) & southern t’úx̣əlq’a both are new kids on the block, and both are real Chinook Jargon.
