“páya” words in Lower Chehalis Salish
Honestly, I’m trying to un-confuse you!
I use this problematic picture with reservations (image credit: Sazerac)
Check out some “páya” words in Lower Chehalis Salish, a.k.a. the łəw̓ál̓məš language.
All of these will be loans from Chinuk Wawa — even though I’m on a mission to make the world notice how Lower Chehalis contributed enormously to CW.
Got that?😒
“páya“ of course has its etymology in English ‘fire’.
In Chinook Jargon, it took on a life of its own, shoving aside the Chinookan-sourced uləptski & becoming a way of expressing many un-English-y senses: ‘ripe’, ‘cooked’, ‘engine-powered’, and so forth.
Here’s what I find of paya in the current draft of the łəw̓ál̓məš dictionary project:
- páya / páyaʔ ‘fire’
- klíš páya ‘candle’
- páya c̓íkc̓ik ‘automobile, train, railroad’
- páya lám ‘whiskey’
- páya wáta ‘whiskey’
Maybe you’ve noticed the funny thing going on here:
Some of these expressions aren’t known to us in the Jargon, from other sources!
If you’ve had much exposure to CJ, you already know páya, of course. And páya-t’sìkt’sik (to write it in a more Grand Ronde style) is an oldie but a goodie.
But we’ve got at least 2 new discoveries here. Folks on Shoalwater Bay, Washington state, traditionally speak excellent Chinuk Wawa, so I believe these are innovations actually in use within their quasi-creole-speaking community:
- páya lám (literally, ‘fire alcohol’)
- and páya wáta (literally, ‘fire water’, using a rare old synonym for tsə́qw that we also find in CJ’s təm-wata ‘waterfall’).
Both of those phrases would seem to trace back to the English-language expression firewater, which is often associated with contact between Indigenous and Settler. Would you find it as compelling as I do to learn that firewater seems to be of the same age as old Fort Vancouver?
Also notable is the rediscovery of klíš páya = (literally, ‘fat/grease fire’) the entry < gleece pire > of the 1853 Columbian newspaper word list. This is in the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary, as klis pʰaya, a rarer synonym for the Métis French-derived lashantel.
Bonus fact:
Indicating the productivity of the firewater metaphor in Fort Vancouver times, Horatio Hale’s 1841 data on Chinuk Wawa from there also records uləptski-tsəqw!
That’s a wholly Indigenous loan translation, a Lower Chinookan-based “calque”, of the English phrase.
This parallels the known synonym pair, təmwata ~ təm-tsəqw, for ‘waterfall’.
