Go commando! How bare can an imperative get in Chinuk Wawa?
One of the easiest parts of Chinook Jargon grammar to learn are the simple commands…
Image credit: Cults 3D
Also known by linguists as bare-stem imperatives, these amount to just bluntly saying the verbal root.
That’s to say, these pups differ from all other Jargon verbal moods in lacking a subject pronoun. (In the case of commands to a single person, that pronoun would have been mayka ‘you [singular]’.)
Real examples:
- mítxwit tənəs-sayá
‘Go step a little farther away’
(Literally, stand a little farther) - pálach-k’ílapay uk íkta!
‘Give that thing back!’ - nanich uk skukúm!
‘Beware of the skukOOm!’
(I.e. a synonym for łúsh-nánich… ‘watch out for…’ Also understandable as ‘Look at the skukOOm!’) - < Mamook whim okook stick. >
(mamuk-xwíʔm* úkuk stík)
‘Fell that tree.’ — an example from yesterday’s post about George Gibbs’s dictionary - míłayt!
‘Sit down!’
I’ll point out that I don’t call these “bare root” commands, since they can further involve inflection of the root by a prefix mamuk- (which is munk- at modern Grand Ronde). To accurately reflect this fact, I call the CW morpho-syntactic phenomenon “bare stem” commands.
(By the same token, non-inflectional stuff that’s added on to the root, like the adverbials -k’ílapay and łúsh- above, is perfectly okay in a bare command.)
Now hear this —
Bare active verbs only!
Only certain semantic types of verb roots can “go commando” (sorry 🤣) as bare-stem imperatives. The above examples are all active verbs, ones whose subject is considered to be in control of making the situation happen.
No bare stative verbs!
By contrast, and true to what I’ve demonstrated to be the “Fluid-S” Stative-Active syntactic alignment of this language, you can’t make a bare command out of a stative verb:
- not okay: *míłayt!*
for *’be sitting!’* or *’exist!* or *’be there!’* - not okay: *sáwásh!*
for ‘be a Native!’ - not okay: *łúsh!*
for *’be good!’*
One good reason for this is, a bare-stem command on a stative verb would sound identical to a declarative comment having the “silent IT” subject — ‘it’s there’, ‘it’s good’, etc.
Speaking of prefixed verbs — it seems predictable that prefixed statives are equally impossible as bare-stem commands. So, for instance, the “change-of-state” prefix chaku- only occurs with stative stems:
- not okay: *chaku-háyásh!*
for *’grow up!’* - not okay: *chaku-kə́mtəks!*
for *’learn (it)!’* - not okay: *chaku-łúchmən!*
for *’become a woman! / turn into a woman!’*
Here’s a really interesting wrinkle, for my mind:
Also apparently out of the question are bare-stem commands formed with the other inflectional prefixes, such as hayu- (ongoing action) and kəmtəks- (customary / typical action). Despite at least one of these prefixes having historically grammaticalized from an active verb (hayu is ‘to go’, whereas kəmtəks is the psychological stative ‘to know’), such formations have meanings that are more stative than active.
(Even though these otherwise have active-verb syntax, putting their subject before the verb, and being able to take a direct object in the right circumstances.)
This, to my way of thinking, is a somewhat enlightening finding. In Chinook Jargon, a word’s meaning helps determine what formations it can be involved in — just as the formations a word is found involved in can determine its meaning.
Less surprisingly, you also can’t make bare-stem commands involving the helping/auxiliary verb tiki ‘want to’. That’s because ‘wanting’ is another stative verb, a mental state.
(I can think of another auxiliary/helping verb formation in the Jargon, the recent Grand Ronde coinage, munk-pus {VERB} ‘try to {VERB}’. But that one, I’m thinking, should be perfectly okay in a bare-stem command, because it’s an active verb in itself.)
How do you make stative commands, then?
All of the above stative, non-bare-commandable types have to instead use a common workaround. Which, let’s be clear, can also be used with active verbs!
It involves not a morpho-syntactic imperative, but a quasi-imperative strategy/phrasing, łúsh pus mayka {VERB}. (Literally, ‘it’s/it’d be/it’ll be good if you {VERB}’.)
Negative commands (prohibitives):
Likewise available to all verbs are a couple of negative strategies, again not morpho-syntactically a command, but instead a paraphrase:
- wík mayka {VERB} (‘don’t you {VERB}’),
- and łúsh pus wík mayka {VERB} (‘it’d be good if you don’t {VERB}’)
/ wík łúsh pus mayka {VERB} (‘it wouldn’t be good if you {VERB}’).
It seems to me, from a quarter-century of exposure to Chinuk Wawa, that bare-stem (i.e. no subject pronoun) negative imperatives are rarely used, even with active verbs. Among the few examples I’m easily finding as I write this is, from the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary, page 247:
wik hayu-munk-q’áyʔwa ma siyáxus!
‘Don’t be crossing your eyes!’
Bonus fact:
We can reasonably say that the simplest explanation for a source, or model, of the Chinuk Wawa bare-stem command form is in the Indo-European parent languages of CW.
Speakers of both provided a sustained input to the Jargon:
- First English, which was present in the earliest, Nootka Jargon-oriented contact phase that gave birth to Chinuk Wawa.
- A generation later, Canadian/Métis French joined in.
Both feature bare-stem imperatives, e.g. regarde! and look!
The other 2 “parent” languages of the Jargon work a little differently from this…
Southwest Washington Salish (“Tsamosan”) languages add a suffix to form an imperative, e.g. Lower Chehalis ʔís-aʔ! ‘come (here)!’ But yes, there’s no subject affix in these languages’ command forms, so we could say here is a third potential source for the Chinuk Wawa pattern.
The situation in Shoalwater-Clatsop Lower Chinookan, the fourth parent language of the Jargon, is somewhat less clear to me. Franz Boas’s “Illustrative Sketch” of the grammar seems to tell us only that imperatives (at least, of transitive verbs!) lack a subject pronoun — okay. But the seeming commands that I find when I comb through his publication of Q’lti’s “Chinook Texts” are certainly complex morphological formations. (Cf. page 176 amškƛ̓ímn ‘dive’ in contrast with ałkƛ̓ímn ‘they dived’; p. 200 łuwacká ‘follow him’, p. .225 tə́kəman ‘look at them!’) Some of them may even contain an Imperative affix, I’m imagining.
(Others are probably not commands at all, by Lower Chinookan standards, but instead simple declaratives which I believe do contain the “you” prefix m-. Cf. page 211 mə́-txʷit ‘stand’, p. 216 m-úkʷła ‘carry’, p. 223 m-úya ‘go’. Certainly we find in Chinuk Wawa plenty of cases where mayka + verb, identical to declarative “you” forms, gets used as a command.)
In summary, all 4 “parent languages” of the Jargon use some variant of the “bare stem” command strategy, which in fact is supremely common among the world’s languages. That is, all 4 leave out the second person singular subject “you”. However, the very closest match for Chinook Jargon’s commands, which don’t add any Imperative morphology, is in English & French.
