Joe Peter’s ~ isə́q ‘paddle’ sounds Salish-y!
Today I’m trying to jot down just a quick thought.Working the other day with the truly wonderful group who are methodically transcribing the late Joe Peter’s many hours of Chinuk Wawa audio…
— (Message me for info on joining in!) —
…we noticed how he seems to pronounce the CW word we know as ísik ‘paddle’:
Image credit: Joe O’Paddles
“ísəq”
This is from his work with John Marr in 1941 to translate page 232 of Charles Cultee’s [Lower Chinookan language] “Chinook Texts” (published by Franz Boas in 1894), where a character urges, “Paddle slowly”.
My first thought was, wow, Joe Peter makes this word sound a lot like Salish words for ‘paddle’ or ‘paddling’ a canoe!
For reference, see my previous posts,
- “A New Quileute => Salish => Chinuk Wawa Discovery“
- ” ‘Alder’ as ‘Paddle-Wood‘ “
- (also “Ísik-Stík is Ash, Not Elm, and It’s Creole CW“)
In those earlier pieces, I discussed a regionally shared form that may trace to the Quileute language. It shows up, for instance, as cáqʷł in Cowlitz Salish, and as < sak-talm > in Puget Sound Chinook Jargon, both meaning ‘paddle’. The root in these cases appears to be something like √ʔaqʷt ~ √ʔatqʷ. The “c” and “s” that you see here reflect prefixation in Salish languages.
My point today is that Joe Peter’s pronunciation as ʔísəq in the Jargon might reflect his acquaintance with Southwest Washington Salish.
He uses a number of other Cowlitz Salish words in his Chinook Jargon, we’ve found. So it’s conceivable he may have been influenced by Cowlitz in coming up with this particular way of saying the word for ‘paddle’. — Even though the result is a form previously unknown to us in Cowlitz, Chinuk Wawa, and/or Chinookan.
And this leads my mind to a further point, a more definite factual one.
It’s agreed by us linguistic scholars that this word came from a Chinookan original, thus something like i-sik, where i- is the Masculine Singular noun marker and –sik is the root. The 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary of Chinuk Wawa rightly points out Clatsop Lower Chinookan as the one known source in the available data.
The distribution of the source Chinookan noun, limited to Clatsop (which is the Chinookan language traditionally spoken farthest down the Columbia River) and absent from the upstream Chinookan languages (Kathlamet, Clackamas, and Wishram Kiksht), would be typical for the potential borrowings from Salish that we’ve identified in the past.
However, in dutifully examining the source data available on each of those languages, I find that a probable cognate of i-sik does in fact show up in Wishram Kiksht: here it’s written as icki’…
…which in a more modern notation would be i-škí ‘paddle’ (noun), or in Grand Ronde-style spelling, i-shkí.
That’s a mighty good match for isik.
What we don’t know is whether the storyteller was lapsing from Wishram Kiksht into Jargon for this noun (thus preserving the chance of a Salish-to-Clatsop origin) —
— or whether it’s an actual native Kiksht cognate for i-sik.
