Sliammon Coast Salish words borrowed from Chinuk Wawa
When we comb through a dictionary of a Pacific Northwest Indigenous language, we often find wonderful preserved bits of Chinook Jargon — and so it with the Sliammon Coast Salish language of British Columbia.
The most extensive lexicon available to me at the moment for this language is the one at First Voices.
I understand there’s a much more complete Sliammon dictionary gradually getting put together by community members, but for now, I think you’ll be pleased with the following finds:
- čɛham[-]awt̓xʷ ‘church’ is Salish, not Jargon, but it reflects the widespread Northern Dialect CJ phrase styuil-haws (as it’s written in “Kamloops Wawa”), literally, ‘prayer-house’
- saplen ‘bread’, with a typical PNW Indigenous pronunciation turning the original “L” at the end of the word to an “N”
- činuxʷ[-]qɛn ‘the Chinook jargon’ — this uses the word Chinook (in a locally Indigenized pronunciation) plus the Salish suffix for ‘language’
- top ‘stove’ — this is Chinuk Wawa stup, treated as if it were native to local Salish, which therefore removed the “S-” because Sliammon historically got rid of that noun-marking prefix. Linguists will be excited to see that this helps us to date that linguistic shift in Sliammon to the post-contact era, since CW wasn’t much of a presence for this ethnic group until perhaps the 1860s.
- kəpo ‘jacket’
- kʷašu ‘pig’
- kʷatə ‘quarter’
- kʷinspala ‘[New] Westminister’, from Queensborough
- laplɛt ‘priest’
- kʷul[-]awtxʷ ‘school house’, from skul-haws, with the second part treated as the native Salish suffix for ‘a building’
- lahal̓ ‘bonegame’, which is both lahal and slahal in Jargon
- lakʷa ‘cross’
- ?? lalaxʷi ‘hand[k]erchief’
- lamato ‘sheep; goat’ — ‘goat’ is a new sense for this word
- lam[-]ayɛ ‘bottle’ — this is precious evidence of an obscure old Jargon word, lamala, itself a Jargon-Salish hybrid.
- ?? laspol ‘ball’
- layam ‘devil’
- lesapik ‘archbishop’ — really useful to see that this means ‘archbishop’ in Sliammon, not just ‘bishop’. In the era when Sliammon had lots of contact with Chinuk Wawa, pretty much the only lesapik ‘bishop’ was also the ‘archbishop’ of BC.
- lɛsack-ɩwʊɬ [sic, weird phonetic notation] ‘burlap sack’ — the Jargon word plus the Salish suffix for ‘real, genuine, best example of’, so we seem to have here the linguistic archaeology proof that gunnysacks were the original ‘sacks’ that the Sliammons encountered. Also notice Sliammon ləsak ‘scrotum’, a new sense of this word for us!
- ləplaš ‘plank or long board’
- ləpyos ‘mattock; pickaxe’
- lɩkɛlɛstɛ ‘communion host’ — an important Catholic CJ word
- lɩklɛ ‘key’
- mɛt/mit ’10 cents/dime’ in the more Indigenized pronunciation of Jargon bit
- mətole ‘Victoria’, the capital of BC
- mušmuš ‘cow’
- pipa ‘paper’
- pun ‘spoon’, again with an original s- removed due to the workings of Sliammon Salish
- sel[-]awt̓xʷ ‘tent’, a half-Indigenized borrowing of Jargon’s sil-haws, again with haws turned into Salish suffix for ‘a building’
- səq̓ ‘fifty cent piece; half breed; could also mean cracked or split’ — not a borrowed word from Jargon, but a borrowed semantic concept
- šete[-]man ‘leader in prayer’, another important Catholic concept in Native BC, where this word became some people’s family name Sundayman (etc.)
- šɛt[-]ɛgos ‘the creator’ exactly matches Chinook Jargon’s sáx̣ali-táyí, literally ‘the above-chief’, God
- šišɛƛe ‘Jesus’ is a beautiful Indigenized pronunciation of the French-to-Chinuk Wawa shisi-kli
- šukʷa ‘sugar’
- tala ‘money’
- tala[-]hawus[-]tən ‘eyeglasses’ contains another half-Indigenized borrowing, where tala[-]hawus is from Jargon’s dala-siyaxwus, literally ‘dollar-eyes’, again treating the second part, siyaxwus, as if it were the similar-sounding Salish suffix for ‘eyes’
- təɛkɩn [sic, weird phonetic notation] ‘sock’, again with s- removed because this is Sliammon Salish!
- wač ‘clock’
- ʔɛlawɛʔ ‘turnips’ is pretty likely from Jargon’s ninamu, a word that got pronounced in very different ways in different locales
- tin[-]pot ‘steam ship’ is yet another case of Jargon’s s- being taken off of the word due to Sliammon Salish preferences; the source is found as stin-put in the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary of Chinuk Wawa, interestingly showing the same change from English “M” in “steam” to an “N” sound
