Why is ‘pole’ ʔísi[-]ɬn in Quinault Salish?
Is this Chinuk Wawa’s ísik ‘paddle’, loaned into the language of the central Washington Coast?
Or could it maybe show us a direct loaning, possibly earlier, from the (Clatsop-Shoalwater) Lower Chinookan language into Quinault Salish?
The offending pole.
It’s a delightful little puzzle.
Quinault Salish has the word ʔísi[-]ɬn for ‘pole’, in Ruth Modrow’s 1971 dictionary. Here’s what that part of the original page looks like:
There’s a drawing of a totem pole along the righthand side of the page. That’s meant to accompany these ‘pole’ words.
But the illustration is not actually relevant:
- Washington State tribes don’t have an old tradition of making totem poles.
- And the words shown have to do with ‘poling’ a watercraft, using a ‘pole’ to push it upstream.
Transcribing the entries —
ísitłin (í-si-tłin) n. Pole
[DDR: morpho-phonemically ~ ʔísi-łn, ~ ‘the thing used for paddling’ if we have a borrowing of isik here.]ísitłinnelma (í-si-tłin-nel-ma) n. pl. Poles
[~ ʔísi-łn-əl-má, ~ ‘things used for paddling’.]ísitlinneʔm (í-si-tłin-neʔm) Poling the canoe
[~ ʔísi-łn-m, ~ ‘using the thing for paddling’.]ísitłiʔnoʔ (í-si-tłiʔ-noʔ) dim. Little pole
[~ ʔísi-łn̓-uʔ, ~ ‘little thing used for paddling’.]
I’ve been unable to find any cognates of this Quinault ~ ʔísi-łn in the sister SW Washington Salish languages. Compare Lower Chehalis c̓ə́q̓p ‘pole’, for instance. This lack of corroboration boosts the case for thinking the Quinault word is a borrowing.
A piece of the problem that I don’t yet see an answer to is this — why would Quinault have borrowed a Chinookan word for something the local culture already had?
Maybe this has something to do with the known fact that numerous modern-era Chinookans wound up having land allotted to them on the Quinault Indian Reservation. However, I don’t know whether a significant number of those Chinookans actually lived on-rez, and participated in the local “linguistic economy”.
Other thoughts? Did Chinookans have a specific style of canoe pole? Perhaps one that was made from a tree species that was more common in Chinookan land, and was traded to Quinaults?
Bonus fact:
I checked in the unrelated neighboring language Quileute, and the word for ‘pole’ is completely different — so it’s not the source of the Quinault Salish word.
Bonus bonus fact [added after I published this post]:
If Lower Chinookan’s word for ‘paddle’ was not (only?) i-sik but (also?) i-siq, a valid variant pronunciation in Lower Chinookan would’ve been i-siʔ … which might make a borrowed Quinault form with the observed stem ʔísi more likely.
