Boas 1892: Many discoveries in a short article (Part 15: ‘to put aside, up’)
Another of the now well known Chinuk Wawa words that Prof. Franz Boas was the first to document in print is t’úʔan, which now means ‘to have, keep’.
Image credit: Learning Works for Kids
In his remarkable one-page 1892 article “The Chinook Jargon” (really a letter to the editor) in Science, Boas presented “additional words belonging to the same dialect of the jargon which was recorded by Horatio Hale and George Gibbs” — words from Shoalwater Bay, Washington, that he clearly perceived as being southern-dialect items.
One word Boas presented in that piece is translated by him as ‘to put aside, [put] up’, t’ô’ᴇn in his spelling.
The meaning that he gives is interesting for us to take note of. It clearly reflects the Lower Chehalis Salish source, whereas at Grand Ronde, Oregon, it developed into a possessive copula, ‘to have’.
Speaking of the Lower Chehalis etymology, in the original Salish this word is constructed of the root t’úʔ ‘to put away’ and the object suffix -n ‘it’ (plus the silent 3rd person perfective-aspect subject suffix -Ø), thus literally ‘(s)he put it away’.
(Or else it’s a Salish imperfective, t’úʔ-n ‘(s)he is putting away’.)
(Or else it’s a Salish imperative form, t’úʔ-aʔ-n ‘put it away!’ It’s often hard to definitely reconstruct a word’s original form, when you only know it as a loan into another language. Lots of the verbs in Chinuk Wawa were originally commands in the source languages.)
Altogether a nice example of the big, hitherto under-recognized influence that Lower Chehalis has had on Chinuk Wawa. And a nice example of how words’ meanings quickly evolve in the course of pidginization and creolization.
Bonus fact:
This word t’úʔan is unknown in the Northern Dialect. There, we’ve continued to use the original Southern Dialect word for ‘have’, miłayt.
