Culture lessons: Things Chinuk Wawa doesn’t do (Part 6: say it!)
How come a lot of the “things Chinook Jargon doesn’t do” come down to differences between this language and English?
Image credit: Gamewright
It’s obvious. In the Pacific Northwest these days, pretty much all of us speak English far more often than any other language. And most of us aren’t bilingual or multilingual.
So, when we start talking Chinuk Wawa, we typically bring in some of our English-speaking habits. Have you caught yourself doing such a thing?
For example, today I want to remind you,
there’s no word for ‘it’.
When you’re reading the stuff I put on this website about CW, you’ll often see the symbol “Ø“.
Sometimes I call it “silent IT”.
It’s the 3rd person pronoun.
Wait, what?, you say — yaka is the 3rd person pronoun, meaning ‘she, he’ and so on.
That’s true. Plus, you should remember the 3rd person plural pronoun ɬaska ‘they’!
But the deal is, a strong trend in the actual Jargon speech that’s documented from the past has both yaka and ɬaska referring only to “animates”. That’s humans, animals (mainly larger ones), and Indigenous myth characters. All of these, typically, are definite, identified beings, but they don’t have to be — a comment that will make more sense to you in a moment.
Contrasting with the way yaka and ɬaska are used:
Fluent speakers have preferred to express “inanimates” with silence. That is, to express “it”, you might say that the best Chinuk Wawa speakers leave out yaka. (That’s not my way of thinking. But, whatever works for you!) This is why I’ve long taught people that CW has “another pronoun”, the silent “Ø“.
Hmm, if the animate pronouns are usually definite & identified things, is “it” usually indefinite & unidentified?
Nope.
More to the point is to realize that, although yaka and ɬaska are typically [+animate, +definite], they are also used for [+animate, -definite], just like English saying “If you meet someone that talks Chinook, you should greet them with “ɬax̣ayam” “.
Our silent “Ø” occupies both of the other 2 possible spaces in a grid of those two bracketed traits:
- [-animate, +definite] (“it” and also the “them” that refers to non-living things)
- [-animate, -definite] (“some (of it etc.)”)
The one situation where I can see our English “it” corresponding to animate yaka is a pretty obvious outlier. Sometimes we refer to a baby as “it”, or an animal as “it”, in English — and those would certainly be yaka in normal Chinook Jargon.
But those aren’t prototypical “it”, are they? In essentially all instances where I can remember calling a baby or an animal “it” in Pacific NW English, average speakers would be equally or more likely to spontaneously refer to “she” or “he”.
That’s not the case with the inanimate stuff that we talk about!
