Lower Chehalis ‘fast; hurry’ ~~ Chinuk Wawa ‘fast; hurry’
One word in Lower Chehalis Salish (an ancestor language of Chinuk Wawa) has 2 uses…
Chinook Jargon has de-cluttered its vocabulary for ‘fast’ & ‘hurry’
(image credit: A Slob Comes Clean)
…which is paralleled in CW itself.
The word lál̓al̓ was translated by elder speakers as if were an adverb ‘fast; and as if it were a verb ‘hurry, do fast’.
Perhaps we should analyze this as fundamentally an adverb.
Lower Chehalis adverbs tend to be inflectable as verbs, cf. xʷə́ƛ̓ ‘very’.
And Chinuk Wawa, whose history is strongly influenced by Lower Chehalis, uses its stem áyáq in these same two ways.
Is the CW usage pattern due to Salish influence? We’ve found other syntactic patterns in the Jargon that seem to have that origin.
I haven’t found clear evidence of such single-root polysemy in K’alapuyan languages, when I check around in McCartney’s giant dictionary. These languages aren’t major ancestors of Chinuk Wawa.
Moving on to known ancestor languages of CW:
Compare the 3 other SW Washington Salish (“Tsamosan”) languages, each of which does use a single stem for both the verb ‘hurry’ and the adverb ‘quickly’:
- Quinault láʔal ‘hurry; fast, quick’
- Cowlitz Salish ƛ̓ə́x̣•ƛ̓ax̣-ł ‘hurry; fast, soon, right away’
- Upper Chehalis x̣áxʷ ‘hurry; fast, quick’
When I look in the Lower “Chinook Texts” and “Kathlamet Texts”, I don’t see clear Chinookan evidence of a single root used as both a verb ‘hurry’ & adverb ‘quick’. But certainly we could take some of the uses of the uninflected adverb ayaq ‘quick(ly)’, when it’s an exclamation there, as equivalent to a command to “hurry!” Otherwise, ayaq accompanies separate, fully inflected verbs of all sorts. There are no verb stems that I could find meaning ‘hurry, rush, hasten’, etc. Fascinatingly, in Clackamas, we have both this ayaq and a synonym lálayx ‘hurry’, pretty similar in sound to the Lower Chehalis and Quinault Salish form. Kiksht seems to use a totally different form ~ kʷəlt.
All things considered, it’s less likely for the newer language (Jargon) to influence older languages on such a fundamental level as syntax — less likely than for older languages to have supplied the syntactic patterns of Jargon.
I’m obligated to point out that there are 2 more major ancestor languages of Chinuk Wawa to consider: English and (Métis/Canadian) French. But neither of those, to my knowledge, has a stem that’s used for both ‘quick’ and ‘hurry’.
And I’m unaware of any wordlwide tendency for contact languages (pidgins and creoles etc.) to “co-lexicalize” ‘hurry’+’fast’. I checked in Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea, for example, and found 2 separate stems for these 2 functions: kwik and hariap.
So it seems to me that the most likely model for Chinook Jargon’s adverb & verb ayaq is an Indigenous metaphor in SW Washington Salish: QUICK :: HURRY.
A secondary likelihood is Lower Chinookan languages, which supplied the word ayaq and a broadly similar usage pattern. (Plus that uncanny resemblance of Chinookan lalayx with Salish ~ lalal.)
