Ikta Dale McCreery yaka t’ɬap (Part 13: stresses, running fast, and more)
Our friend Dale McCreery PhD has sometimes sent reports on bits of Chinook Jargon he notices in the area of Bella Coola, British Columbia.
A coureur de bois (image credit: Wikipedia)
Here’s a note of Dale’s from October 28, 2015 (originally on the “Chinook Jargon” group over at Facebook):
Been talking to a partial jargon speaker. Things remembered:
- phayaa (emphasis on second syllable)
- mama, papa (also, stress on second syllable)
- phaya-mamuk, to make a fire (nayka phaya mamuk).
- tamnaas.
- kulik – to run fast.
Regarding that phayaa, it looks like ‘fire’ but it also resembles the widely used sayaaaa ‘very far away’.
The stress going on the end of mamá & papá is interesting. There was a good deal of variation in how folks typically said these two words.
The phrase phaya-mamuk (‘fire-make’) is in the reverse of usual Jargon word order; this is one of the indications of Chinook being probably a distant memory for the person speaking these items.
I wonder if tamnaas is a pronunciation of t’əmánəwas, ‘spirit power’?
And kulik, it seems to me, might be a contraction of kúli áyáq. My reasoning is, in the northern dialect of Chinook Jargon, kúli routinely just means ‘to move; to travel’. So speakers had to add áyáq ‘quickly’ if they meant ‘run’. (In the southern dialect, kuli already means ‘to run’, just as it does in the Canadian/Métis French source language — although we can pause a moment to think about the old expression coureur des bois!)
(My WordPress software doesn’t want to let me create a link on that phrase, so please copy & paste the following to read about coureurs de bois: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coureur_des_bois#:~:text=’%22runner%20of%20the%20woods%22,various%20European%20items%20for%20furs.)
