Boas 1892: Many discoveries in a short article (Part 23: to vomit)
Look what else emerged from Prof. Franz Boas’s brief 1892 article on “The Chinook Jargon“…
Image credit: Chinook Medical
A word for barfing.
(Click here for the previous installments in this series.)
Doctor Boas’s 1890s phonetics have this word from Shoalwater Bay, Washington, spelled as ō′E, ‘to vomit’.
In the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary of Chinuk Wawa, that’s ʔóʔ.
This word is exceptional in Boas’s 1892 paper, in that it wasn’t exactly a new discovery to linguists.
It had already been published, in the French-style spelling hoho, in the 1871 Demers, Blanchet, St Onge dictionary (and catechism).
But it’s a first anyways, by virtue of adding a newly observed phonetic detail, the glottal stop.
Researchers had not been very good at noticing and notating that /ʔ/ sound previously.
Boas himself wasn’t superb at glottal stop spotting, but he was more likely to catch this “catch” in the throat when it was between vowels.
Between vowels? You’re asking me, hey, doesn’t ʔóʔ end in a consonant, the /ʔ/?
Yes, you’re right about that.
But Boas, like many speakers of Indo-European languages, tended to hear Pacific Northwest languages’ glottal stops at the end of a word as being followed by (what they sometimes called) an “echo vowel”.
Sometimes those anthropologists and linguists would represent this echo vowel as a raised letter — maybe suggesting it struck them as a whispered vowel — at the end of the word, which could give you something like this in writing: óʔª.
(Those same researchers hardly ever noticed glottal stop at the start of a word. This is why I’ve not put a ʔ at the beginning of that example.)
In Boas’s case, this is why he has his phonetic letter for “schwa” at the end of the word in 1892, the capital E in his ō′E.
Anyhow, those so-called “echo vowels” are 100% predictable, we eventually realized, and so we stopped writing them decades ago.
So Franz Boas’s spelling ō′E is a small snapshot of an early time in the linguistic study of the Pacific Northwest’s languages.
And that’s a much more pleasant outcome than just talking about vomiting!
