Boas 1892: Many discoveries in a short article (Part 12: muskrat)
Image credit: Bionic Disco
Towards a Jargon translation of “Muskrat Love”…đ
Franz Boas’s tiny but important 1892 article on Chinuk Wawa brings us a word for this mammal that hadn’t been in previous dictionaries.
This < tsini’stsinis > apparently comes from Kathlamet Lower Chinookan i-cĚÉniĚsâ˘cĚÉnis, as the must-have 2012 Chinuk Wawa dictionary by the Grand Ronde Tribes reports.
We can take note of a detail here — the Chinuk Wawa version of this word uses “plain” /ts/, whereas the original in Chinookan uses “popping” (ejective) /t’s/, as it’d be written in Grand Ronde style.
The difference might be significant. Or not. Chinookan languages allow a whole lot of personal discretion to the speaker in deciding whether to “pop” a consonant or not.
Plus, Franz Boas wasn’t consistently very accomplished at hearing the difference between plain & popping sounds.
But sometimes Chinookan words got borrowed into neighboring tribal languages, first and foremost into Lower Chehalis Salish, and were somewhat altered in their sounds.
Also, the Jargon version of this word loses the Chinookan “masculine noun” prefix i-. Such a prefix is mandatory in Chinookan, so we have here a sign of foreign involvement.
So there potentially are two ways that this CW word for ‘muskrat’ diverges from its Chinookan source.
Which could be somewhat compelling evidence of the word being loaned into Lower Chehalis.
And historically, as my research shows, “Chinook” as a tribal name meant both (Shoalwater-Clatsop) Lower Chinookan and Lower Chehalis Salish. So “Chinook” words in the Jargon often have both Chinookan & Salish ancestry.
In summary — today we’ve added a likely Salish component to the etymology of this Chinuk Wawa word.
