Lempfrit’s legendary, long-lost, linguistic legacy (Part 21: some lovely complex expressions)
The 21st pair of pages in this precious document again brings us plenty of stuff worth knowing about Chinook Jargon.
(Here’s a link to the other posts in this mini-series.)
Image credit: Ballistic Ink
Where you see me underlining stuff here, it’s material that was added by the manuscript’s writer HT Lempfrit, from his good personal knowledge of the Jargon.
“[SIC]” shows that someone mis-wrote a word. It wasn’t necessarily Lempfrit, since he was copying from someone else’s manuscript, Modeste Demers’ now-lost original to be exact.
So, where I’m showing differences between Lempfrit & somebody else, it’s Alphonse Pinart’s “Anonymous 1849” copy that I’ve been able to compare with.
Where you see [le]tters in square brackets, they’re not visible on the page copy that I’m working from, but we infer that they really are there!
By the way, if you see the notation ___ it means that the preceding entry is repeated in that position, along with some additional word(s).
There aren’t so many new discoveries in today’s installment, but this material does show us nice evidence that complex expressions already existed in early-creolized (southern-dialect) Chinuk Wawa by 1849.
See if you recognize words in these unusual spellings! I think we have a couple more small discoveries today, again showing the value of examining every Chinuk Wawa document — even those that appear to be straight copies of each other!
6e espèce de mots
adverbes‘6th sample of words:
adverbs’
- sahālé: en haut ‘above’
- kikoulé: en bas ‘below’
- alta: à présent, déjà ‘now; already’
- okouk son: aujourd’hui ‘today’
Literally, ‘this day’.- tahanlé*: hier ‘yesterday’
- hihkt-tanlké*: avant hier ‘day before yesterday’
Literally, ‘one/another yesterday’.
- toumala: demain ‘tomorrow’
- pous kopet toumala: après demain ‘day after tomorrow’
Literally, ‘when tomorrow’s done’.- sonté: semaine ‘week’
- kōl: année ‘year’
- ayak: vite, bientôt, de suite ‘quick, soon, right now’
- tlawa: lentement ‘slowly’
- léhélé: longtemps ‘a long time’
- ankaté: il y a longtemps ‘a long time ago’
- tchi: nouvellement, il n’y a pas longtemps ‘not long ago’
- kansih̃: quand, combien ‘when; how much’
- wek: jamais ‘never’
- kopet: assez ‘enough’
- mank: plus, d’avantage ‘more; any further’
This is Southern Dialect only; the Northern Dialect says iləp-.
- ktouhlka: trop ‘too much’
This is one of the earliest known occurrences of t’úx̣əlq’a!
- wek lélé: bientôt ‘soon’
Literally, ‘not a long time’.
- tlounas: je ne sais pas, peut-être, qui sait? ‘I don’t know; maybe; who knows?’
- kata: comment? ‘how?’
Ces deux derniers mots vont souvent ensemble. ‘These two last words often go together.’
- Tlounas kata okouk: je ne comprends pas cela. ‘I don’t understand that.’
Literally, ‘maybe-how that’, i.e. ‘Who-the-heck-knows how that is.’Kata est d’un usage très étendu.
‘Kata is of very wide use.’- Kata maïka okouk son? Comment es-tu aujourd’hui? ‘How are you today?’
Literally, ‘how you this day’.
- Wek kata naïka: Je n’ai rien. ‘I have nothing.’
Literally, ‘not-how I’, i.e. ‘I can’t (do anything)’, using the idiom wík-qʰáta .
- hihkt-hihkt: de temps en temps, quelquefois ‘from time to time; sometimes’
Literally, ‘one-one’, i.e. ‘one (and) another’ / ‘once (and) another (time)’.
- kah̃: où, quelque part ‘where; somewhere’
- kanawé kah̃: partout ‘everywhere’
Yes, literally ‘every-where’.
- ilep: au commencement, d’abord ‘at the start; first of all’
- tlounas kansih̃: je ne sais pas quand, combien ‘I don’t know when (or) how much’
Literally, ‘maybe how.much’, i.e. ‘who-the-heck-knows how-much’.
- kwanisom: toujours, souvent ‘always; often’
- ayo: très, souvent ‘very; often’
[I’m not completely sure what punctuation Lempfrit has in his French definition; it could be très-souvent, ‘very often’., but that seems less likely to me.]
- kakwa: pareillement, comme cela, de même que, c’est pourquoi, pour cela ‘similarly; like that/this; just as; this is why; for this/that reason’
