How do you use “tu məch” in northern Chinuk Wawa?
We may only have a couple of examples of tu məch (‘too much’), but they’re indicative…
Image credit: Kaltash Wawa, for obscure reasons
If you go looking for them, they’re spelled < tu myuch > in the Chinuk Pipa shorthand alphabet of the Kamloops Wawa newspaper, 1891-1904.
- …kopa tu məch tiki tlap chikmin…
‘…from too much wanting to get money…’
(KW #65, 12 Feb 1893, page 28) - …iaka tu məch klahawiam pus mitlait kopa ukuk ilihi…
‘…(s)he was too pitiful to live on this earth…’
(KW #152, May 1897, page 75)
At first look, I thought I had 2 different animals here, the first use being a Quantifier telling us how much wanting there was, and the second one being an Adverb showing an excessive degree of the (predicative) Adjective ‘pitiful’.
I thought twice.
The first sentence’s tiki ‘wanting’ is actually a verb, never a noun in my experience of Chinuk Wawa. And a predicative Adjective, as in the second sentence, is by definition a verb in this “Stative vs. Active” language.
So in both cases we just have an Adverb of excessive degree.
So tu məch in northern Chinook Jargon, at least in the British Columbia style, is another of the same kind of “word” as iləp, which expresses the comparative degree of adjectives and adverbs. (Presumably tu məch can also be used with adverbs, to express concepts like ‘too fast’, ‘too slow’ and so on.)
Bonus fact:
Why am I writing tu məch as 2 words? We don’t have məch used anywhere else that I know in northern Jargon. But, we do have tu, especially in the frequent expression tu lit ‘(too) late’! So it seems tu is its own thing; therefore lit & məch are their own words as well!
