Lower Chehalis ‘you’re stupid’ + Chinuk Wawa
Another of the countless cases where Lower Chehalis Salish and Chinook Jargon parallel each other closely:
Lower Chehalis says hílu ʔasqʷə́ləm, translated by one elder as “He’s not intelligent.”
Image credit: Life Meets Theology
More exactly, it’s ‘you’re not intelligent’ (hílu ʔa-sqʷə́ləm, ‘not [i.e. there doesn’t exist] your-heart/intelligence’).
The Jargon, too, says hílu-tə́mtəm (literally, ‘no-heart/mind’) for ‘lacking sense’ or ‘lacking in principles’. So, hílu-tə́mtəm mayka or hílu mayka tə́mtəm = ‘you’re dumb / foolish / etc.’
And I’ve already written about how Lower Chinookan has the parallel expression, níkšt t-mí-x̣atakux̣ ‘you have no sense’ (literally ‘not the.your.mind’).
To say the least, it’s noteworthy to find the exact same structure in 3 unrelated languages in a very small area of the world.
Logically most likely to me is that Chinuk Wawa got this structure from one or more of the tribal languages mentioned.
Salish certainly makes heavy use of this same structure for all kinds of expressions — even a simple negation of a sentence is phrased as e.g. ‘not my-cooking.it’ for ‘I didn’t cook it.’
So here we’d have another of what I’ve taken to calling “Indigenous metaphors in Chinook Jargon.”
But it’s also possible Chinookan and Salish took in this structure from the Jargon, although I very strongly doubt that. Why? Well, 2 reasons —
- The Jargon can’t have existed, to our knowledge, before 1794. That’s too short a time to have fundamentally influenced the syntactic structure of two unrelated languages in such a fundamental way.
- It’s not just Lower Chehalis and Lower Chinookan that have this structure. All languages in their respective family groups have it. This includes languages much less influenced by (and less influential on) Chinook Jargon.
