Boas 1892: Many discoveries in a short article (Part 21: to stop)
More lovely stuff, new to science at the time, from Prof. Franz Boas’s brief 1892 article on “The Chinook Jargon“…
…It’s so brief, in fact, that it’s more like a quick note to the editor of Science.
Image credit: F Chambers Law
(Click here for the previous installments in this series.)
There are an astonishing number of newfound words presented in his note, considering its shortness.
The one I want to present to you today is k’áʔ, which Boas spells as < k’a >.
Boas accurately gives it an etymology in “Chinook”, meaning in this case the Shoalwater-Clatsop Chinookan language. It’s from an ideophone, a “particle”, known to us only from Boas’s work on that language and spelled by him identically to the above, k’a.
It’s pretty likely that the word ended with a glottal stop in both the source language and in Chinuk Wawa as heard by Boas — we know he simply wasn’t very consistent at hearing and notating that sound.
He defines this word as ‘to stop’.
It turns out, that depiction could benefit from further comment.
In the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary of Chinuk Wawa (which is where I found the detailed etymological info above), this same word k’áʔ is translated as ‘to be quiet, still; be quiet! shut up!’ So that gives you a fuller picture.
I’ll add that k’áʔ is not only a stative (intransitive) verb, as the 2012 definitions suggest, but that it also functions as a transitive. Here are the example sentences from the GR dictionary that demonstrate this variability (“lability” in older linguistics terms):
INTRANSITIVE:
- o k’aʔ mayka!
‘Oh shut up[,] you!’ - alta uk tənəs-tilixam ya kʰiláy-kʰilay, wik ya k’aʔ.
‘Then that child cried and cried, he would not be still.’
TRANSITIVE:
- k’aʔ mayka lapush!
‘Shut your mouth!’
