Didactic dialogues in CW dictionaries, Part 4M (Gibbs 1863 ex phrases/sentences: ‘where?’ and copulas)
The theme of today’s fluent Fort Vancouver-style sentences is asking ‘where?’…
(Image credit: Lingookies)
(All installments in this mini-series.)
…And answering with the equivalent of ‘to be’.
Now, over to George Gibbs’s 1863 dictionary, a little marvel of Southern Dialect information:
- Kah mika mitlite?
‘Where do you live?’
(qʰá mayka míɬayt?
This uses the existence/location copula [“be-verb”] míɬayt.) - Kah mika kahpho?
‘Where is your brother?’
Answer Klonass.
‘I don’t know.’
(qʰá mayka kapxu? t’ɬúnás.
This uses the noun for ‘older brother’, which is now obsolete in all dialects.
It also uses no “be-verb”, or what we can call “SILENT BE.THERE”, Ø, a synonym for míɬayt.
Also, a really interesting use of the discourse marker/adverb t’ɬúnás ‘maybe’!) - Kah okook lope?
‘Where is that rope?’
Answer Kopáh.
‘[There or in that place] (motioning with the chin towards the place).’
(A Native gesture, much like the “pointing with the lips” that you see in the TV series “Reservation Dogs”. We sometimes hear of hand gestures accompanying the Jargon, so it’s nice to see other ways of gesturing getting noticed as well. Some people feel White folks totally fail to notice lip-pointing.)
(qʰá úkuk lúp? kʰapá.
Again, the “SILENT BE.THERE” is used.)
We might draw a generalization from the above tiny set of data — such as this:
Perhaps míɬayt is used preferentially to express a person actively ‘staying, living’ some place, VERSUS Ø, for the location that a thing or person just happens to be in.
We already do know that Chinuk Wawa grammar revolves around an Active vs. Stative verb distinction, which is mostly expressed by picking 1 of 2 possible word orders.
We haven’t previously realized that that distinction, intersecting with something like definiteness effects, might also be put across by choice of “be-verbs”!
This seems plausible to me, considering that we have noticed definiteness gradations happening in other domains, like in the use/non-use of the “resumptive” pronoun yaka.
This conjecture is worth testing. I’ll have my eyes out for more data to check it against!
