Bodies of water in northern Chinuk Wawa

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Here’s some cool relief from the PNW heatwave going on right now 🙂

Spoiler alert — “tumwater” is fake news for northern CW … I’m guessing ‘waterfall’ must be skukum chok (a very common phrase in BC) … if not a newly borrowed English *watir fol* !

From JMR Le Jeune’s wonderful book “Chinook Rudiments“, 1924:22…

Here, we get another snappy example from Le Jeune of the intricate grammar of possession in Chinuk Wawa — where < tlap >, i.e. t’ɬáp ‘catch; find’, equals ‘manage to have; wind up having’!

Anyway, read on for a cool and refreshing lesson about water:

bodies of water

nsai’ika     nsaika     We 
tlap     tlap     have 
sal-chŏk,     sol chok,     the Ocean, 
pi a’yoo     pi ayu     and the 
lēk,     lik,    lakes, 
sta’lo,     stalo,     rivers, 
koo’li-chŏk,     kuli chok,     streams, 
tom-wa’ta,     tomwata,     water falls, 
pi cha’ko     pi chako     and springing 
chŏk     chok     water 
kla’hane     klahani     out 
ko’pa     kopa     of 
e’lehe.     ilihi.     the ground.

One neat tactic in this sentence is the use of (h)ayu ‘many’ to show the plural meaning of lik ‘lakes’!

In my analysis of the language, the phrasing chako chok klahani kopa ilihi (cháku tsə́qw ɬáx̣ani kʰapa íliʔi) does not literally mean what Le Jeune says, ‘springing water out of the ground’. That’s a free translation. Instead, the phrase is saying ‘(there) comes water of the ground’.

qʰata mayka təmtəm?
What do you think?

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