Didactic dialogues in CW dictionaries, Part 4K (Gibbs 1863 ex phrases/sentences: commands & questions)
We’ve waded well into the waters of professional translator George Gibbs’s lovely sentences in Fort Vancouver-era Chinuk Wawa, so let’s launch farther out now.
Image credit: yarn
(All installments in this mini-series.)
Today’s goodie bag is a mix of commands & questions for you:
- Iskum okook lope. ‘Hold on to that rope.’
(ískam úkuk lúp!)- Here’s the very basic style of imperative in Chinook Jargon. You just use the “bare stem” of the verb, without the logical subject pronoun ‘you’ (the singular mayka). If you’re giving a command to multiple people, though, it’s more usual to include the pronoun msayka. These bare-stem commands only work if the verb is Active…you can’t do this trick with Stative verbs such as ‘to be tall’, because *háyásh!* would sound identical to a much more common expression, Ø háyásh ‘it’s large/tall’. (Which uses the “silent IT” pronoun of inanimate and/or abstract entities.)
- I should say the other common way to form an imperative in all Jargon dialects (which appears to be the more common way in my data on the northern dialect) is ɬúsh (pus) mayka + VERB (literally ‘it’s good (if) you VERB’). That variant has an advantage of being usable with both Active and Stative verb stems, and that’s why it’s the usual way to make a command out of Statives in both dialects. Another bonus of this ɬúsh (pus) formation is that you can use it with pronouns of any “person” and “number” — so you can express ‘I ought to VERB’, ‘you folks, VERB!’, ‘let her VERB’, etc. etc. with it.
- A tiny historical note: you can make a good case that the “bare stem” imperative in Chinook Jargon comes from the influence of English, Métis French, or both, because in the Indigenous languages of the area that helped form CJ, you actually add an affix to the stem to make a command.
- Look below for another way to ask folks to do stuff for you…
- Mika na iskum? “Did you get it?’
(mayka na ískam Ø?)- This uses our ever-popular “silent IT”.
- Here, from the “na” particle, we can tell that this is an old-style Yes/No question.
- Later Chinuk Wawa, both southern and northern, effectively lacks this particle, so Y/N questions now have identical word order to statements, just using a different intonation — a feature likely to have been caused or at least reinforced by the influence of Métis French and of English.
- The “na” just about always follows the first word in the question.
- Our “na” is unstressed, as is confirmed by comparison with tribal languages that donated it to Chinuk Wawa, such as Lower Chehalis Salish and Shoalwater-Clatsop Lower Chinookan.
- This particle seems far less frequent up the Columbia River from those 2 neighbor languages, so we see a little of it in Kathlamet Chinookan, and apparently not at all in Clackamas & Kiksht Upper Chinookan. This tapering-as-you-ascent-the-Columbia distribution of a feature in Chinookan, I’ve shown time and again, tends to reveal borrowings from SW Washington’s Tsamosan Salish languages. And I’ve already previously written that na goes all the way back to Proto-Salish, so it’s native to that family of languages, not to Chinookan.
- The “na” turns what would otherwise be identical to a statement (here mayka iskam Ø, ‘You got it’) into a question that expects either a confirmation or a denial of that basic proposition.
- Mika na klap mika kiuatan? ‘Did you find your horse?’
(mayka na t’ɬáp mayka kʰíyutən?)- Another old-fashioned Yes/No question — so the modern equivalent would be “mayka t’ɬáp mayka kʰíyutən?”
- Newhah nika nanitsh. ‘Here, let me see it.’
(níxwá nayka nánich Ø.)- This uses the “silent IT” too.
- And here we see an alternative way of making a request.
- You do this by using níxwá, which I’ve previously suggested also comes from Lower Chehalis Salish.
- níxwá might be the old Nootka (Nuučaan’uɬ) Jargon word ná (which is replaced!) + the Lower Chehalis -xʷ ‘Causative of Motion’ that that language uses in various verbs of bringing.
- Like the na questions, this Jargon formation is also based on plain old declarative statements.
- The níxwá goes first in the sentence, though.
- For my ears, níxwá requests sound pretty polite.
- This formation, too, can be used with other pronouns than ‘you’. It’s especially common with ‘I’ or ‘we’, in which case we often translate it in English as ‘let me’ or ‘let’s’.
- The particle níxwá can also be used all by itself, meaning ‘show me’ or ‘let’s see’.
- So it’s kind of revealing that George Gibbs’s translation here includes both ‘here’ and ‘let me’.
