Salish has lotsa possessives ∴ Chinuk Wawa syntax!

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Many peculiarities of Chinook Jargon grammar have attracted speculation by linguists…

5 times

Image credit: n3onguts

…such as these 5 features:

  • The placement, unusual in the world’s languages, of the negative wik or hilu at the beginning of the clause — often separated from the verb by many intervening words!
  • The also-redundant Jargon possession rule of saying “Dave his blog” and “Natives their language”!
  • The “quantities first” word order (saying ‘many are my children’, ‘only this much am I telling you’) that I keep pointing out to my Jargon students!
  • The fact that “WHere/WHat/WHo/etc.” question words go first in the Jargon sentence!
  • The shifting word order in this language…sometimes it says literally ‘I’m eating’ and sometimes ‘grown up am I’!

Examples of linguists publicly scratching their heads about these oddities of Chinuk Wawa include these written studies…

Those studies worked hard to pay attention to a wide range of Indigenous languages that could have influenced the growth of Chinuk Wawa into the form we know. Much credit to them!

But I want to help out, by showing that the simplest explanation for most, or all, of the Jargon’s weird traits that I listed is input from Southwest Washington Salish (“Tsamosan” languages).

We can be more specific than waving toward that group of languages. Cowlitz Salish, traditionally spoken in the vicinity of old Fort Vancouver, is likely to have influenced Chinook Jargon from that centre’s 1825 establishment onward.

But I believe the single most relevant Salish language to the earliest formative years of CJ is Lower Chehalis Salish.

This language is traditionally spoken the farthest down the Columbia River, by guess who, Lower Chinookans as well as Salish tribes, in the places where we first have evidence of CJ’s existence, 1794 onward. And those Chinookans spoke Lower Chehalis with those who were outsiders to their tribes, because outsiders couldn’t learn Chinookan well.

No surprise, then, that the beginnings of a pidgin trade language in that geographical area would be made of bits of both Chinookan & Lower Chehalis, as well as English & imported Nuuchahnulth!

Here are examples of these structures. Again, these are rare in the world, but normal in Lower Chehalis.

I’ll highlight what stuff intrudes before the rest, which in every example has the verb turned into a noun (!) which is possessed by the subject), with Chinuk Wawa (literal) & English (realistic) translations:

  • Quantifiers:
    • x̣ʷáqʷ n-sčáɬč — Literally ‘It’s all of it, my giving.’
      kʰánawi nayka-pálach
      ‘I gave you all of it; I gave you all.’
    • cílstəlš scúntiʔ-s — Literally ‘It’s five times, his saying to them.’
      qwínəm wawa.ɬaska-yaka
      ‘Five times he said it to them.’
    • hílu tám n-skʷúkʷm̓əɬ — Literally ‘It’s nothing, my cooking.’
      wík íkta nayka-kʰúk
      ‘I have nothing to cook.’
  • WH-questions (but not ‘who, why, how’, for various reasons):
    • čán ʔa-sʔíkʷtəqən tat púʔsuʔ — Literally ‘It’s where, your stealing that kitten?’
      qʰá mayka-kapshwála úkuk tənəs.p’ús
      ‘Where did you get that cat?’
    • tám sx̣ílm̓əɬ-s — Literally ‘It’s what, his doing?’ 
      íkta mámuk-yaka
      ‘What is he doing?’
  • Negated clauses:
    • hílu na swín-s šíʔ ʔálta — Literally ‘Isn’t it, her/his being here now?’ 
      wík na míɬayt-yaka yákwá álta
      ~ ‘Isn’t (s)he here now?’ 
    • hílu n-sk̓ʷápmən — Literally ‘It’s not, my knowing.’
      wík nayka-kə́mtəks
      ‘I don’t know.’
    • míɬt ʔa-swákʷs — Literally ‘It’s not, your going.’
      wík mayka-ɬátwa
      ‘Don’t go! don’t you go!’
  • (one kind of) Yes/No questions (an alternative to the na kind, which uses actual subjects & verbs instead):
    • yə́xʷs ʔa-sk̓ʷapl̓áy̓ən ɬəwálm̓əš — Literally ~ ‘Is it or isn’t it, your understanding Indian?’
      na mayka-kə́mtəks sháwásh(.wáwa)
      ‘Do you understand Indian?’
    • yə́xʷ ʔa-sčín sʔíɬ — Literally ~ ‘Is it or isn’t it, your wanting food?’
      na mayka-tíki mə́kʰmək
      ‘Do you want to eat?’

Every one of the Chinuk Wawa literal translations is a grammatically correct Jargon sentence.

(Except, superficially, for the transitive ones having ‘(s)he’ as their subject. But if you move their suffixed -yaka around to the front of the verb, you have a perfect Jargon sentence there too.)

The Jargon literal translations, keep this in mind, are directly translating Lower Chehalis possessive expressions — the last one, for instance, is saying in Jargon ‘Is it or isn’t it, your wanting food?’, exactly the same as Lower Chehalis.

Which would be a weird way to talk, by our present Jargon standards.

And yet, the Jargon line in each example above is a normal way to express its thought. (However, Yes/No particles like na have become obsolete in modern Jargon.)

This is extremely interesting. Think of it in the reverse direction — these types of Chinuk Wawa sentences can be understood within the grammar of CW as possessives! They have the identical grammar to the Jargon’s expression of “possessor’s possession”. As far as I know, none of us modern speakers of CW thinks of or treats these as possessives, just as regular old predicates.

Now, a bit more analyzing.

We could say that all of the above kinds of Lower Chehalis sentences share one thing in common — “topicalization”. They all treat the function of the sentence (questioning; negating; counting) as the most interesting thing about it…more interesting than the content of the sentence.

Also they’re all technically (syntactically) intransitive, believe it or not. Even when they have a direct object. (Like the ‘stealing the kitten’ example.)

Which leads to this point — they all have the exact same structure as Chinuk Wawa’s intransitive clauses, a Predicate followed by its Subject.

For this broad pattern to show up in so many facets of the Jargon, I’m thinking the “possessed nominalized clause” formula was very early in CW.

This is one of the most powerful proofs I have that Lower Chehalis Salish influence was strong in the formation of Chinuk Wawa.

Other word orders became used. Some of them were probably in place from the start. For instance, none of the patterns I’ve mentioned today accounts for (other) simple declarative clauses, particularly transitives. Most of those have similar word order to English and French, putting a subject before a verb, and then an object.

So from the earliest known years, the Jargon could’ve been using both Salish-inspired and European-inspired sentence patterns, each for different functions.

Does this remind anyone else of “mixed languages”?

Anyway — to my thinking, it seems beyond random chance that exactly the same set of sentence types (quantifiers; WH-questions; negations; and Yes/No questions) would have exactly the same word order in both Lower Chehalis and Chinuk Wawa!

An extra thought experiment is, to what extent might the following feature of Chinook Jargon also reflect Lower Chehalis possession-marking?

  • The folksy, and unnecessarily windy, wording of Jargon, which literally says redundant things like “my mom she’s reading” and “those guys they ran away”! These are identical in CW to if you said “my mom yaka reading” (i.e. my mom her reading) and “those guys ɬaska running away” (i.e. those guys their running away).

To me this seems mostly coincidental. Lower Chehalis doesn’t have a possessive formation for sentences like these. I tend to stick with my analysis that ɬaska and yaka here are instead “agreement markers”, which allow every verb in Jargon to have a subject pronoun — even when a noun subject (mom, guys) is already being expressed.

Bonus fact:

Lower Chinookan similarly places quantifiers & WH-question words up front in sentences, making these for example superficially similar to Lower Chehalis and Chinuk Wawa. But in Chinookan, the verbs remain verbs. They are never expressed as nouns, nor possessed. So it would seem the Chinookan language did not play a distinct role in shaping this area of Jargon grammar.

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?

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