t’łax̣anhæn and SW WA Salish ‘hand’::’personal characteristic’
Really just a short research note here.
Image credit: Youtube
In the Southwest Washington Salish languages (the 4 that scholars have sometimes labeled with the artificial word “Tsamosan”), the lexical suffix meaning a person’s ‘hand’ can also express someone’s ‘personal characteristic’.
That’s a bit like the English-language noun ‘hand’ being used to mean ‘an expert’ or ‘a specialist’ — as in “cowhand” or “an old China hand”.
This Salish fact came to my mind as I puzzled for the hundredth time over the, well, puzzling word in Grand Ronde Chinuk Wawa,
t’łáxanhæn
‘a deadbeat, a good-for-nothing’
The 2012 GR dictionary is on the right track when it makes a comparison with the SW WA Salish verb for ‘hunting’, which is indeed shaped more-or-less identically to that t’łax̣an bit.
So, how about if we hypothesize that the -hæn ending actually reflects local Grand Ronde people’s knowledge, rather some time ago, that…
(A) …words can end in a unit meaning ‘hand’ to express ‘expert’, etc.?
(B) …the English word for that sounds like hæn?
Because then, we’d have an in-group metaphor and/or joke, ‘a professional hunter’!
Need I repeat that Lower Chehalis especially, among the SW WA Salish languages, had a demonstrably huge role in shaping Chinook Jargon from the earliest days, continuing well into Grand Ronde reservation times… Lower Chehalis is mentioned in about 260 posts on this blog of mine, as of the day I’m writing this.
