Culture lessons: Things Chinuk Wawa doesn’t do (Part 10: Synonyms)
There are very few synonyms in Chinook Jargon.
Quick, can you think of 2 expressions in CJ that mean exactly the same thing?
Image credit: Thesaurus.plus
This is unlike the language I grew up speaking, English, where ‘car’, ‘automobile’, etc. definitely refer to the same thing.
The Jargon doesn’t even care to make fine lexical distinctions among closely related meanings, such as we see in English ‘to water / hydrate / moisturize / moisten / dampen / drench / soak / liquefy’ etc.
I reckon young languages, and those of small communities, have this feature.
Typically, when we do find synonyms in Chinuk Wawa, at least one of them is a newer use of an existing word. So, reading an Indigenous person’s writing from British Columbia, you can easily find someone expressing ‘send a letter’ by either of 2 ways:
- mash pipa which primarily means ‘send’ a letter
- patlach pipa which primarily means ‘give’ a letter
The verbs mash & patlach are totally synonymous in this expression. But not elsewhere. Their synonymy is very restricted.
Here I’ve been talking about synonyms within one dialect of Chinook Jargon. There are very often different words used in the Southern (call it the Grand Ronde) dialect, versus the Northern dialect. A simple example: ats is the Southern word for ‘sister’, but it’s sista in Northern. These 2 words are synonymous, but it’s unlikely any one speaker used both of them in their Jargon.
And I’ve also been limiting my point of view to a single moment in time. The vocabulary of CJ has continually evolved through time, as happens in any language. So, we’re told that this language used to say uləptski for ‘fire’, but it no longer does. We now say paya. There’s testimony that these 2 words were in use side-by-side for a little while — but true synonyms in the Jargon seem to give way to the use of just one word for the concept involved.
So this is sort of the good news:
As you learn Chinuk Wawa, you typically don’t need to get acquainted with multiple ways of expressing the same basic concept.
This is not to say that CW somehow has a small vocabulary. We do need to acquaint ourselves with the nuances given by compounding, and by adding affixes such as mamuk- and chako- to a verb stem.
