‘HIDDEN’ :: ‘SHUT’, an Indigenous metaphor

Rats & mice have a reputation of thievery in the Pacific Northwest.

If you’re one of these rodents, you take things from humans in secret, that is, without their permission.

Just look at Chinuk Wawa’s xúlxul: it means ‘mouse, rat; thief’.

Certain words in Lower Chehalis Salish, one of the main ancestors of Chinuk Wawa, got me thinking about Indigenous metaphors such as this one.

Lower Chehalis has a verbal root, c̓úm̓ (if you’re more familiar with Grand Ronde’s way of writing sounds, that would be t’súmʔ), meaning apparently ‘secret, covered’.

And that root gets used in the word c̓úm̓-xʷ-əy̓-əps, which is one of the words for ‘mouse, rat’!

Literally, this can be understood as ‘secretly makes it go (away) with the tail’ and/or ‘makes it go be hidden with the tail’. (Quite possibly, ‘the one with the tail secretly makes it go away’, etc.) A very similar word is found in the sister language Quinault Salish, too.

Once I had puzzled out the literal meaning of that word for ‘mouse’ and ‘rat’, I got thinking about 2 more Lower Chehalis words.

Image credit: Wikipedia

c̓úm̓-us is ‘barnacle(s)’, apparently not the stalked goose barnacle but the Balanus species. To a Salish student, this is obviously ‘closed eye’!

And c̓úm̓-s-y̓əq(-Ø) is one of the words for ‘to die’. Its complex structure breaks down to a meaning of  ‘(s)he got to being closed-eyed’.

I wish I could track down the Indigenous North American story I once read that used the expression “the earth closed its eye on him”, when someone died.

Speaking of creative language, all 3 of the above may very well be historically taboo-related words, euphemisms. But at any rate, they demonstrate the Indigenous metaphor, SECRETLY :: HIDDEN :: CLOSED.

Now, let’s turn our attention to the Chinuk Wawa word ípsət. It, too, means both ‘hidden’ and ‘secretly’! And it gets used as the adverbial first member in compounds:

• ípsət-wáwa ‘to talk a secret language or code’
  (secretly-talk)
• ípsət-łátwa ‘to desert, abscond, steal away’
  (secretly-go) 
• ípsət-mámuk ‘connive, plot’
  (secretly-do) 
• ípsət-nánich ‘to spy on’
  (secretly-watch)

I’ve previously written about some history relating to this. In Chinook Jargon, there was another way to express exactly this same metaphor of HIDDEN :: SECRETLY. (See “EARLY CREOLE KAPSHWÁLA(-), LATER CREOLE ÍPSƏT(-), AND CW GRAMMAR CHANGE“.)

It emerged perhaps 2 generations earlier than the ípsət- structure, and it instead used kapshwála ‘steal’ as the adverb in the compound. From the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary, here are examples, all of them notably from the section on words not gotten from recent elders:

• kapshwála-ískam ‘take in secret, sneak away with’
  (stealing-take)
• kapshwála-łátwa ‘abscond, steal away’
  (stealing-go)
• kapshwála-mámuk ‘do in secret’
  (stealing-do)
• kapshwála-músum ‘to commit adultery’
  (stealing-have.sex)
• kapshwála-wáwa ‘to speak ill of, slander’
  (stealing-say)

Some of these kapshwála- expressions retain that word’s original meaning of ‘stealing’. But not all of them do so. ‘Do in secret’ and ‘speak ill of’, for instance, don’t seem much like thieving to me. So they may have more to do with an already existing Native metaphor than with folks getting inventive with their Chinuk Wawa!

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?