Northern-dialect CW interrogative “ikta”~”pus ikta” etc. ⇐ SW WA Salish?

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Clause-initial pus ikta, pus kata, and pus kah (synonymous with plain ikta, kata, and kah ‘what?, how?, where?’) in northern-dialect Chinook Jargon as spoken by Salish people is probably influenced by how their Indigenous languages work.

Men_at_work-Who_Can_It_Be_Now_(Australia)

Image credit: Wikipedia

I should say that the best analysis of pus that I’ve arrived at is in my 2012 dissertation, where I summarize all of its senses as a unified IRREALIS — a marker of a situation seen as not-yet-factual.

For a couple of nice comparisons: 

On the southern Washington coast, content-question words (“WH-words”) in Lower Chehalis Salish, a parent language of CJ, tend to be accompanied by what I understand to be an EVIDential.IRRealis particle, thus wát ʔi ‘~who might it be?’, q̓əwát ʔi ‘~when might it be?’, tám ʔi ‘~what might it be?’, wi tʔín ʔi ‘~how might it be?’, etc.

Meanwhile, up in southern interior British Columbia, the Nłeʔkepmxcín (“Thompson”) Salish language also habitually pairs content-question words with what’s at least historically IRRealis morphology. Pages 166-167 of the 1992 grammar by Larry & Terry Thompson (no, really!) shows forms that use the roots for ‘which? / is is that…?’ & ‘what?’ followed by the “UNRealized” particle k before the predicate being questioned. And forms using the roots for ‘who?’ and sometimes ‘how?’ are followed by the “ConJunctiVe” particle us, which goes back to the Proto-Salish subordinate/irrealis predicate marker.

Looking through the published texts in CW’s co-parent Lower Chinookan and its sister Kathlamet, which are not Salish but Chinookan languages, I see that it’s only quite rarely that an IRRealis suffix seems to accompany a WH- question word.

Seems like it’s much more characteristic of Salish to form these IRRealis + WH-question structures that also crop up in Northern Dialect Chinook Jargon. 

Now, Northern Dialect CJ came into existence decades after the formation of CJ, and a couple hundred miles or more to the north. Was there any comparable structure in the earlier, Southern Dialect? 

I think the answer to that is, yes.

Make no mistake, Demers, Blanchet, and St Onge (1871, based on 1838+ data) don’t have pus + WH-word.

But it’s tremendously noticeable that they have another oddity: WH-words can be followed by na. Now, this na was the “Yes/No” question marker in Chinook Jargon. Technically we’d never expect it to occur along with “the other kind” of question, the content queries. Examples:

To my mind, there’s something vaguely, well, equivalent here.

A) Putting a marker of hypothetical status onto a content-question word feels to me rather similar to
B) putting on a marker that asks for the reality/hypotheticality status of the questioned situation. 

Plus, WH-word + na can be seen as the same syntactic pattern as SW Washington (Tsamosan) Salish WH-word + ʔi.

Maybe Chinuk Wawa at most stages and in most places has had this Indigenous, particularly Salish, tendency to combine WH-questioning with IRRealis marking?

Another note — I doubt that it’s only Salish that has this tendency, among Pacific Northwest languages. It’s more likely that it’s an areally shared feature, I’d guess. But I have not checked further among e.g. the Wakashan or Chimakuan languages, because their syntax has not had a demonstrable impact on the evolution of Chinook Jargon.

And, need I point out to my present readership, neither of the 2 Indo-European co-parents of CJ (English & Métis French) have any prominent tendencies to combine WH-words with IRRealis marking.

Bonus fact:

The “broken lower-case h” letter that’s used in Demers, Blanchet, and St Onge (1871) is suddenly striking me as looking rather like a fancy “r”.

And we know that many other French-speaking missionaries and documentors of Chinuk Wawa wrote “r” for this same sound /x ~ x̣/.

Huh!

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