Boas 1892: Many discoveries in a short article (Part 14: ‘to pursue’)
Adding to our ample proof that Lower Chehalis Salish has had an enormous influence on Chinuk Wawa, heretofore not given due recognition….…are these 2 new synonymous discoveries from Shoalwater Bay published in 1892 by Dr. Franz Boas:
to pursue, mê′tl’ᴇn, or tᴇ′k·s’ᴇn
In the modern Grand Ronde way of spelling, that would be mít’ɬən and tə́qsʔən.
One of these is not new to us, because tʰə́qsin ‘to follow, pursue’ is in the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary and it’s used by their language and culture program.
(I’ve explained its Lower Chehalis etymology previously as ‘to close a distance by foot’.)
But this mít’ɬən is almost certainly a word you haven’t seen before.
It’s another Lower Chehalis Salish verb, míƛ̓ən ‘look for someone/something’.
(That’s analyzed in that language as míƛ̓-ən-Ø ‘look.for-3.singular.object-(s)he’, that is, ‘(s)he looked for it/her/him/them’.)
We can see how this word could’ve come to be translated as ‘pursue’ in English by Franz Boas; I expect that in local Jargon it held onto its meaning of ‘search for’, though.
We can tell that mít’ɬən is specifically a Lower Chehalis verb, by the way — it’s not from one of the 3 other SW Washington Salish languages.
Here’s why.
In Cowlitz and in Upper Chehalis, the cognate root is pronounced differently (with an /ə/ or /e/ sound, depending on the inflected form), and it means something different (‘to try; to test’)!
In Quinault, the pronunciation and meaning of the root are similar to Lower Chehalis — but instead of an inflected form *míƛ̓ən*, we find míƛ̓i.
And so, again, we see one particular Salish language, ɬəw̓ál̓məš (Lower Chehalis), playing a big part in forming lower Columbia River-region Chinook Jargon.
This influence was very early, because Lower Chehalis was traditionally spoken by the Chinookans of Chinook Village (to Salish relatives and outsiders) along with their own tribal Chinookan language (spoken to close Chinookan relatives).
We don’t need to change the name of “Chinook Jargon”, though, because “Chinook” (a Lower Chehalis word!) was always understood to mean the linguistically mixed population of that village and its vicinity.
