Getting the etymology of “kʰánumákwst” together
Everyone knows, kʰánumákwst in Chinook Jargon means ‘together’, and ‘together’ = kʰánumákwst.
And we all know, from the superb 2012 CJ dictionary of the Grand Ronde Tribes, that kʰánumákwst comes from a Lower Chinookan particle — an uninflectable word having similar shapes in both Clatsop-Shoalwater (“Lower Chinookan” proper), and in Kathlamet Chinookan.
Image credit: Community Foundation of Grant County
I don’t know what got into me to look up that fact, but I’ll tell you — beware of becoming a linguist. You’ll never take a story at face value again 😁
#1: I immediately noticed that the 2012 dictionary doesn’t tell us what that Lower Chinookan particle means in those languages.
(A) What does it mean there?
(B) And how is it used in Lower Chinookan — are there any interesting differences from CW’s employment of it?
#2: I also saw that GR 2012 implies kʰánumákwst is a sort of a compound in those languages, containing a piece ~ kʰánu + a piece ~ mákwst. Well, we know mákwst is the numeral for ‘2’ in Lower Chinookan (thence in Chinuk Wawa), and kʰánu looks a lot like CW’s kʰánawi ‘all, every, completely’. In the next edition of the GR dictionary, I would add cross-referencing between the entries of kʰánumákwst & kʰánawi. The latter in fact also indicates kʰánawi as a compound of ~ kʰána + a piece ~ wi, implying that these 2 CW words are etymologically related to each other.
So then, what do ~ kʰánu / kʰána and wi mean?
So, we come away with several questions about the background behind Chinook Jargon’s kʰánumákwst.
I dutifully started researching in the 4 Chinookan languages for some answers.
The answers to question 1 are surprisingly interesting.
#1 (A): It’s reasonably clear that there does indeed exist a Lower Chinookan word, actually shaped like kánəm, meaning approximately ~ ‘together’ all by itself. It gets immediately followed by a numeral word, e.g. what’s glossed as ‘five together’, kánəm qʷánəm in Clatsop-Shoalwater. It’s not strictly a particle, since it can take some inflectional affixes, such as the Plural-marking prefixes & suffixes in ł-kə́nəm ł-lákt-iks ‘four together’. The ancestor of Jargon’s ‘together’ word, Lower Chinookan (s-)kanə(m) (s-)makwst ‘together both’, only denotes the dual number, that is, two things or people together. (I suspect it’s even further restricted, to 2 Subjects/Agents only.) This type of numerical phrase may be an “areal” feature, as I notice Charles Cultee provided single Lower Chehalis Salish words to Franz Boas that each expressed ‘3 together’ and ‘4 together’ in the 1890s.
An incidental specification, of a geographic nature — I do also find a cognate, kána š-t-mákʷšt, ‘together’, in Clackamas Upper Chinookan, at least once; Clackamas is a neighbor of Kathlamet & Clatsop-Shoalwater. But I haven’t found such a form in Kiksht-Wishram Upper Chinookan, farthest up the Columbia River from these sister languages.
#1 (B): It also emerges, from looking at large amounts of data like the published “Chinook Texts” and “Kathlamet Texts”, that ‘together’ is only rarely expressed by this construction of kana + a numeral, which seems limited to numerals that tally a following, overtly expressed noun, e.g. the words for ‘bundles’, ‘elder brothers’, or ‘wives’. Well, ‘together’ in English (and in Chinuk Wawa!) occurs in many more settings than that! So, all the other senses of ‘together’, such as ‘living together’, ‘getting glued together’, ‘meeting up together’, and more, are instead expressed in Lower Chinookan through various inflectional suffixes on verbs.
#2: The particle kana/kanəm etc. appears to be the portion that carries the meaning fof ‘together’ in the original Chinookan languages. Therefore, the word kʰána(+)wi ‘all’, which by the way behaves like the kana + numeral forms above in (almost always) having to accompany a noun, seems to be literally ‘together + ?all?’.
#2, continued: I’m wondering, whether kʰánawi might in fact, historically, have been the kanəm variant of kana ‘together’, plus the known Chinookan Adverbial suffix, -i. There was considerable free variation among the voiced bilabial consonant sounds in Lower Chinookan, such that it’s sometimes hard to determine whether a speaker “meant” to say /m/, or /b/, or instead /w/.
These are a few thoughts that I hope contribute to our understanding of how Chinook Jargon came by its very common word kʰánawi.
