What Nez Perce láwtiwa• makes us think…
Haruo Aoki’s high-quality dictionary of the Sahaptian-family language that most of us casually call Nez Perce, which is Ni•mi•pu•tímt in the language itself, contains another word that makes us think about the history of Chinook Jargon.
This word (which I happened to see in an example sentence in someone’s published linguistics book) is láwtiwa• ‘friend’.
Image credit: Youtube
As Aoki points out, “The second element…tiwé•, which means ‘-mate’, or ‘co-…-er’ is clearly isolable.”
So we have a word made of 2 meaningful parts in the Ni•mi•pu•tímt language, láw ‘friend’ and tiwa• ‘-mate’, thus ‘co-friend’ / ‘friends with each other’.
Why am I talking about Nez Perce?
It’s because some of the earliest known occurrences of the Chinuk Wawa word for ‘friend’ are clearly from a related Nez Perce word, síks-tiwa• ‘close friend, cohabitant, mate; (used as a vocative) dearest, darling’.
The tiwa• there is in fact the same item as our tiwé• above. (In Ni•mi•pu•tímt there is “vowel harmony” which determines which form of a suffix gets used.)
I am positively fascinated that early Chinook Jargon did not borrow the ordinary, generic word for ‘friend’ from Nez Perce, but instead the more emotionally intimate word for a close friend!
To my way of thinking, this fits well with our consistent finding that the Jargon was a language of direct conversation — more, that is, for talking with people than it was for talking about people. Chinook Jargon was often the language of close personal relationships, from “best friends” to spouses.
Bonus fact:
Here I also want to make a tie-in with the formerly puzzling Jargon word láwtish ‘a bickerer, argumentative person’.
When I wrote up an explanation for where that word actually came from, I was still slightly mystified at the /l/ sound that starts the Sahaptian-family words that seem involved (alongside some Salish-family words). I wrote:
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Ichishkíin (Yakama, Sahaptian) lamtús ‘competitor, opponent, challenger, rival, enemy’
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Imatalamɬaamí S
ínwit (Umatilla, Sahaptian) lamtús ‘rival, opponent (as in the hand game)’ -
Ni•mi•pu•tímt (Nez Perce, Sahaptian) lem’tú•s ‘rival, opponent (e.g., in a stick-game)’
You’ll see that the closest resemblance among these to the CW word are the Sahaptian-family expressions. They have /m/ instead of /w/, but check this out, Nez Perce (and perhaps the other Sahaptian languages) regularly alternates between these two sounds, for what I believe is diminutive or similar affect.
Now that I’m aware of láw-tiwa• ‘friend’ in Ni•mi•pu•tímt, I’m wondering if Sahaptian speakers (quite long ago) might have heard Salish ʔewtús ‘enemy, rival’ as being similar to Ni•mi•pu•tímt láw-tiwa•.
In order to distinguish ‘friend’ from ‘opponent’, likely in a stickgame setting, Sahaptians could have mutated the pronunciation of the Salish word, giving something very much like that Jargon word láwtish ‘a bickerer, argumentative person’ — that is, perhaps, an ‘enemy, rival’.
