A Jargon metaphor from SW WA Salish / English? ‘Hit/find/get’ <=> ‘arrive at’ a place
There’s a metaphor in Chinuk Wawa that we only seem to know from the Northern Dialect…but evidence suggests it may be older, from the Southern Dialect.
Image credit: JForrest English, on You Tube
The word that basically means ‘find; manage to get’ can also mean ‘to reach a place, to get there’.
One of the only dictionaries to mention this use of t’łáp is John Booth Good’s 1880 publication from British Columbia, which gives the meaning ‘arrive’.
In the Grand Ronde Tribes’ 2012 dictionary, we don’t find this usage. For ‘arriving’, there’s just the dedicated motion verb q’úʔ.
But when we look at the Southwest Washington Salish languages (also known as the “Tsamosan” group), we see a striking, and perhaps old, similarity to the CATCH/GET/FIND <=> ARRIVE metaphor, in the form of a HIT/CATCH <=> ARRIVE metapor:
- The Cowlitz language has the essentially homonymous roots
- kʷáxʷ- ‘hammer on’
- and kʷáxʷa- ‘arrive, get there, reach’
- Lower Chehalis (a parent language of the Jargon) has two relevant metaphors:
- kʷə́xʷ- ‘to smash’
& kʷáxʷ-š-ən ‘they were arriving at them (some stones)’ in a traditional story
(in which, by the way, the stones are said to be continually smashing together) - and also yə́lxʷ- ‘find’
& yə́lxʷ-t-ən ‘they were arriving at it (a prairie)’ in a traditional story
- kʷə́xʷ- ‘to smash’
- Upper Chehalis has
- kʷáxʷ[-]n-tn ‘platform from which eels are caught’ [literally ~ ‘the catching tool’]
- and kʷaxʷá- ‘get to, arrive, reach’
- I don’t yet find this type of metaphor in the available Quinault data. But its wide occurrence in SW WA Salish could indicate its long existence in this group of languages.
Combing through the “Chinook Texts” of Q’lti (Charles Cultee; published by Franz Boas) in the Lower Chinookan parent language of the Jargon, I don’t yet find any such semantic piggybacking of ‘find, reach, arrive’.
Thinking of a third among the 4 big parent languages of Chinuk Wawa, does North American, especially Canadian/Métis French, have anything like the GET <=> ARRIVE metaphor? Can my readers enlighten me?
The fourth parent language, English, does indeed have this kind of metaphor, with its ‘get (something)’ & ‘get to, get there’. English, like SW WA Salish, also has ‘hit’ used as ‘arrive at’, as in “By the time we hit 50 years of age”; “Hit the road, Jack”; and “We hit New York at 3AM”.
When I consider all of this information, it seems likely to me that Chinook Jargon itself did have its FIND <=> ARRIVE metaphor already quite early.
Two of its 3 early parent languages, English & Salish, but not Chinookan, seem to have had a pre-existing habit of using this type of expression. The presence of both the ‘hit’ and the ‘find’ variants in just one of these languages, Lower Chehalis Salish, suggests to me that the Jargon may have contributed or else reinforced the one that’s based on ‘find’.
French might be less important to consider, in that it’s a later parent language, becoming influential (1811 at the earliest; more definitely 1825+) at least a generation after CJ came into being (1794+).
If we can infer that Chinuk Wawa’s FIND/GET <=> ARRIVE metaphor was an early trait, then it’s one of several that we find best preserved in the later, Northern, Dialect. The Southern Dialect underwent a number of rapid growth stages, winding up losing quite a few of the features it originally possessed.
Bonus fact:
Another example of the conservation of a feature in Northern Dialect that the Southern Dialect lost is the Intensive prefix hayas(h)- ‘very-‘.
