sík tə́mtəm ‘sorry’ from Salish?

I noticed a Lower Chehalis Salish term, ɬə́č̓+sqʷələ̀m, meaning ‘heartburn, hangover’…

Image credit: Amazon

This is a compound, literally ‘hurts + heart’, which, when you realize it has the same Verb+Subject word order as Chinuk Wawa, means ‘the heart hurts’.

This is an exact parallel with the form of Chinuk Wawa’s very common expression, sík tə́mtəm, ‘sorry; sad; etc.’

I suspect the Lower Chehalis term historically denotes emotional, not physical, feelings, as in the Jargon.

Compare the sister language, Quinault Salish, with ~ (ʔi-)qʷúm sácət ‘abdomen hurts, stomach hurts’, and ~ ʔit-qʷúm ti sqʷə́ləm-ə-s ‘sore heart; sorry’. You see ‘stomach’ indicates a physiological sensation, and ‘heart’ psychological perceptions.

This very productive “X tə́mtəm” idiom in Chinook Jargon, which lets you express all kinds of interior feelings and psychological states, quite likely comes from its SW Washington Salish ancestor languages.

SW WA Salish has an amazing abundance of parallel formations to this, using 3 options:

1. not just the full word sqʷə́ləm ‘heart’ as seen above,
2. but also the ancient Salish “lexical suffix” shaped like -ínwət ‘heart, interior, feelings, thoughts’, 
3. and also a “relational” suffix indicating mental experiences, which is how Cowlitz & Upper Chehalis Salish express ‘sorry’–‘feeling hurt’ with the same root as in Lower Chehalis. (Remember that ‘feeling(s)’ in Chinook Jargon is also tə́mtəm.)

So ‘X heart’ appears to be a very old idiom indeed, in local Salish.

When I checked around in other ancestor and input languages of the Jargon, I found … quite possible confirmation of this Salish-ancestry hypothesis. Here are some hyperlinked notes that I made:

• CHINOOKAN LANGUAGES:
  • Lower Chinookan
    • Shoalwater-Clatsop ‘sad’ (expressed as ‘his sadness’, the typical Chinookan-family way of ascribing a quality to a noun),
    • Kathlamet both ‘sorry‘ (as ‘not good his heart’, parallel to Chinuk Wawa wík-ɬúsh yaka tə́mtəm) &  ‘sorry‘ (as ‘their sadness’)
  • Upper Chinookan
    • Clackamas no ‘sorry’, no ‘sad’ found
    • Kiksht ‘sorry’ < wic galixux >, and ‘sad’ < q!E’ctu galaxu’xwax > (that is, both seem to be ideophone [sound-symbolic word] plus ‘do/make’, another typical native Chinookan strategy)
• K’ALAPUYAN LANGUAGES: ‘sorry’ (expressed as he felt ill in his heart, exactly parallel to CW’s sík tə́mtəm)

Synthesizing this evidence:

1. I see Chinookan mostly depicting the emotion of regret in the 2 ways we know to be highly distinctive of, native to, and ancient in that family of languages.
2. I see one instance in Kathlamet Lower Chinookan, and one in K’alapuya, of a speaker using a translation equivalent of the Jargon’s ‘heart is hurting’. (Both ‘ill’ and ‘hurt’ are the core meanings of Jargon sik.)

The outlying (#2) cases are likely to be mental translations from Chinuk Wawa, therefore not evidence of old usages in those languages.

So: add “heart expressions” to our enormous and growing list of apparently Salish input in the earliest formative days of Chinuk Wawa.

Just to be painfully clear: the Jargon word sik comes from English. The Jargon word təmtəm comes from Chinookan. But the idea of saying ‘hurting heart’ in Jargon is from Salish.

Bonus fact:

In the Lower Chehalis Salish expression that inspired today’s post, ɬə́č̓+sqʷələ̀m, we see the typical stress pattern of compounds in that language:

1. There’s primary stress on the first element ɬə́č̓ ‘hurting’.
2. There’s secondary stress on the second element sqʷələ̀m ‘heart’.

That stress pattern has been of great help to me in figuring out how Lower Chehalis grammar works, in my 10 years of research so far.

And it’s precisely the same pattern that we find in Chinuk Wawa. In fact I have methodically argued that CW’s grammar of compounding also comes from Salish.

The main difference is that in my analysis, the Jargon only allows Noun+Noun compounds. (The 2012 Grand Ronde dictionary and the tribal education program mark many other kinds of expressions as compounds, for ease of teaching & learning.) The first noun modifies the second one, for example in tála-hàws (literally ‘money-house’), which means ‘a bank’. Linguists might say this is a “Token+Type” formation, because the first member of the compound tells what token/example/instance you have in mind, of the second member’s type/generic/class. It’s as if Chinook Jargon said Sapiens homo instead of Homo sapiens!

Lower Chehalis Salish additionally allows, as you can see from today’s example, Verb+Noun compounds. The Noun in today’s example is the subject of that verb, because the verb is intransitive. As far back in ancient time as we can reconstruct, Salish languages in general have allowed numerous kinds of complicated words, mostly involving one way or another of “incorporating” a Noun into a Verb. Famously, Salish incorporates dozens of shortened forms of Nouns, as “lexical suffixes”, into its verbs. With transitives, the incorporated noun can also be an object, or other (more peripheral) argument, of the verb.

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?