másh is ‘leave’, NOT fundamentally ‘throw’

Let’s throw out the idea that Chinuk Wawa’s verb másh has a fundamental meaning of ‘to throw’ something.

I think that that’s been many learners’ impression.

Image credit: walks.ca

And I think that that impression has caused a lot of unneeded trouble for learners of the Jargon.

The fundamental semantics of másh are, instead, ‘to leave’ something.

This traces back to what must have been the original sense of the word, I mean in Canadian/Métis French.

There you have the verb marche! 

That’s a command, as are any number of verbs from French in Chinook Jargon. 

In French, it meant (and means) ‘leave!’, ‘get going!’, and so on. 

It’s something that we know the French-Canadian employees in our Pacific Northwest historical fur trade said to horses, so a good translation of its original French sense would also be ‘giddyup!’ 

This is why I’ve come to understand the Jargon’s másh as fundamentally ‘to leave’ a place, person, or thing. 

That’s why it’s not confusing at all when we frequently find másh used for obviously non-throwing events. 

Those oldtime voyageurs were, characteristically, people in motion.

Virtually every day, they — with their Métis families in tow! — were traveling to a new location, whether on “the brigade trail” bringing furs back East, or to a new trapping spot. 

This intransitive command másh must have been heard constantly, in those settings. 

And in Jargon, it would’ve soon gotten extended to ‘leaving’ or ‘letting go of’ a person or an object. 

Only later, once this word had made its way into the young Chinook Jargon language, would its sense have been extended to the transitive ‘putting’ something away or ‘putting’ it in a certain place. 

And later yet, I think, may have come the transitive sense ‘throw’ — in practice, we find this to be mostly the everyday concept of ‘throw away; discard’. (Rather than e.g. throwing a spear or a net, neither of which we think would be actions closely associated with talking in Jargon.) 

Only once that meaning extension had happened, by my reasoning, would the meaning have gotten clarified by the addition of the word for ‘far; away’ (perhaps under English-language influence, thus likely in the post-Fort Vancouver era, in Settler times): másh-sáyá ‘throw (it) away’. 

From a historical linguist’s perspective on másh, this word’s considerable amount of meaning change, and its eventual syntactic mutation from only intransitive to multiple, “ambitransitive“, usage, suggest that this word has been involved in Chinuk Wawa from some of the earliest days. 

So másh is probably one of the oldest Chinook Jargon words. 

And you personally will get the most use out of the understanding that its core meaning is ‘leave’. 

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?