Lower Chehalis’s ‘stands up the sail tool tool’, and Chinuk Wawa influence
A word of Lower Chehalis Salish from elder Emma Luscier in 1941 ultimately shows traces of Chinuk Wawa.
And that word, saved in the notebooks of “field” linguist John Peabody Harrington, is…
Image credit: Song of the Paddle
c̓úq̓ʷlím̓ɬt̓ə
What, you don’t recognize it from your knowledge of Chinook Jargon?
Let me write its sounds in Grand Ronde Jargon style:
t’súq’ʷlímʔɬt’ə
Still nothing? 😂
Well, it’s translated as the ‘foremost thwart’ [of a Chinook canoe], more helpfully as ‘the foremost thwart in which the sail is inserted’.
This is the “mast partner” in English, I’m told by Tony A. Johnson of the Chinook Indian Nation.
This Salish word clearly contains the verb root c̓úq̓ʷ, meaning ‘to set up; put down upright’.
Given that clue, maybe we can figure that the remainder, lím̓ɬt̓ə, might mean something like ‘mast’. The “mast partner” is literally ‘it stands up the mast’, it looks like, and that feels right on track.
And, in lím̓ɬt̓ə, we recognize the Instrumental suffix –t̓ə.
That leaves lím̓ɬ to figure out.
What’s a lím̓ɬ?
I’ve never previously found this word in Lower Chehalis.
But:
- It seems to contain the other shape we know of for the Instrumental suffix, –ɬ. And from other words, we know a root lím̓, ‘to cover’. So lím̓-ɬ = ‘the thing for covering stuff’.
- Since we’re talking, so far, about ‘it sets upright’ the mast i.e. ‘the tool for the lím̓-ɬ‘, we can guess that lím̓-ɬ = ‘the sail’.
Hmmm! How can ‘the thing for covering stuff’ and ‘the sail’ be the same thing?
Here’s your cue. Have you learned yet that Chinuk Wawa long ago borrowed the English word sail to mean both ‘sails’ and ‘cloth’?
Do you reckon ‘cloth’ can be ‘the thing for covering’ stuff? Like maybe your body?
Often it’s of great use to compare Lower Chehalis words with ones in its 3 nearby sister languages. For instance, Quinault has lím-ɬn ‘cloth’ — where the -ɬn is indeed Quinault’s version of Lower Chehalis’s -ɬ Instrumental suffix. This is to say, Quinault has essentially the identical word, and uses it for ‘cloth’.
Do you see it yet?
Lower Chehalis lím̓-ɬ and Quinault lím-ɬn together preserve the semantic range of Chinuk Wawa’s síl ‘cloth; sail’.
There has been some question about whether Indigenous people used sails, prior to the arrival of Euro-American outsiders.
The Salish use of the same metaphor, CLOTH :: SAIL, as in Chinook Jargon — a language we can’t confidently date to prior to a 1794 ship overwintering in Chinookan land — suggests to me that sails maybe were a new item to Native folks.
That’s right, I’m suggesting that Lower Chehalis c̓úq̓ʷlím̓ɬt̓ə ‘foremost thwart’ very clearly preserves the fossil impression of Chinuk Wawa!
Bonus fact:
The same root lím̓ in Upper Chehalis is mainly used for ‘to set a net’, I guess ‘to “cover” an area of water with a net’.
Both Upper Chehalis and Cowlitz Salish have wholly changed over to expressing ‘cloth’ by the Chinuk Wawa borrowing sil! I don’t know about Lower Chehalis.
How is ‘sail’ expressed in the Southwest Washington Salish (“Tsamosan”) sister languages? It’s actually hard to find words for this in Lower Chehalis, Upper Chehalis, and Quinault, which perhaps is more evidence that ‘sail’ is a newer concept for them.
But, we do find a clue in Cowlitz Salish, where there’s a word for ‘sailboat’, also using the Chinuk Wawa loan word sil; it’s this:
ʔac-síl-x-tani t wíɬ
has-SAIL-?-Instrument Indefinite.Article canoe/boat
The relevant word is the first one, in red. It appears to mean ‘having (ʔac-) a SAIL tool (síl-x-tani)’. (All together, ‘a sail tool – having – boat’.)
I think it’s significant that Cowlitz forms its word for ‘a sail’ in the same way as Lower Chehalis, calling it ‘a tool for’ (-tani, cognate with Lower Chehalis’s –t̓ə) sail use.
Bonus bonus fact:
That suffix -x in the Cowlitz word for ‘having a sail’, síl-x-tani, is of as-yet-unknown meaning, according to dictionary maker M. Dale Kinkade.
But my Spidey senses tingled to see that it occurs both in this word, and in ʔac-ƛ̓íp-x-tan ‘it’s covered’. I’ve “corrected” Kinkade’s entry for this term, to show that -tan is also a form of the Instrumental suffix.
This word then means ‘it has’ (ʔac-) ‘a cover’ (ƛ̓íp-x-tan). This latter word is literally ‘a thing/tool for’ (-tan) ‘covering’ (ƛ̓íp-x).
The other known uses of the root ƛ̓íp ~ ‘cover’ have the suffix -š ‘Applicative’, i.e. ‘doing something for/”on” someone’. The sound /š/ and /x/ in Cowlitz Salish are “the same thing”, both being modern descendants of older */x/. In the word for ‘a sail’ (ƛ̓íp-x-tan), then, the ƛ̓íp-x- part seems something like ‘(put a) cover-on’.
So now we have a pretty good possible explanation of the -x in síl-x-tani ‘sail’.This word would be ‘a thing/tool for’ (-tani) ‘putting a sail’ (sil) ‘on’ (-x) something. (Following the Cowlitz ordering of things, ‘a sail putting on tool’, if you prefer that approach.)
My point here is that I notice Cowlitz uses exactly the same structure in 2 words, those for ‘a sail’ and ‘cover’. (I take ‘sail’ as a noun, so it’s weird to find the -x verbal suffix on it, but this may add to our argument that the two roots are being treated as if equivalent.)
See?
SAIL :: COVER is essentially the same metaphor as we find in Lower Chehalis + Quinault SAIL :: CLOTH/COVER!
And in each case in this group of languages, it’s COVER that’s expressed by an ancient, Indigenous Salish root, and SAIL that’s expressed by a borrowed root (or else clear traces of a borrowed root).
Bonus fact:
I find a little more of interest with ‘sail’ & ‘mast’ in some other Coast languages. Hm. I should write all of this up in a little research paper to publish!
