Some broad ideas about “Tenino”
The Umatilla Sahaptin dictionary is a treasure.
Edited by the very knowledgeable Noel Rude, this very fine 2014 publication shows us all sorts of wonderful pieces of northeastern Oregon’s indigenous linguistic heritage.
Image credit: NPR
One entry that I found informative was Tináynu ‘Tenino, Washington’.
Not that this is a central concern, I think that that definition needs some explaining. From the example sentence about “Wishram Indians at Tenino”, I reckon we’re talking about the Columbia River area — that’s an Upper Chinookan tribe. Modern-day Tenino, WA is quite a ways northwest, in Thurston County kind of near Olympia. The referent of Umatilla Tináynu is likely to be the Sahaptin-speaking people of the north (Washington) bank of the Columbia such as the “Ochechotes“.
This Umatilla Tináynu, like the other entries in this dictionary, isn’t shown with a morphological parse or a literal meaning. At first glance, it would seem like it may have an etymological connection with the nearby entries that use a stem/root /tinay/ meaning to ‘back in, go inside backwards, apparently going back to proto-Sahaptian because it’s shared with the Nez Perce language.
An example of a word using that basic form is Umatilla tináynačt ‘back in, go inside backwards; [to] set (of luminary) [such as sun, moon]’. I very much suspect that this is the actual, true etymology of “Tenino“.
Well, I mention all of this because of the claim sometimes made that “tenino” was a word of Chinook Jargon, meaning ‘vulva’. I’ve previously written that this word is not provable as CJ. But I’m now prepared to consider that it really was a locally used word of Jargon.
One reason for my shifting to this position is that another possibly Sahaptin-sourced word referring to females, “wapsina“, shows up in local CJ of northeastern Oregon. That word may, I think, be imperfect Sahaptin, as heard and spoken by Settlers: it appears to have meant ‘(young) woman’, but to come from a Sapatin stem/root for ‘braids’!
Similarly, I see from the Umatilla dictionary that Settlers may have misunderstood Tináynu. They may very well have heard and recognized the similar-sounding Umatilla noun tanáy ‘vagina’. And they may have justifiably, and wrongly, supposed the two words to be related.
Let’s remember that one or more previous self-proclaimed experts on Chinook Jargon have claimed “Tenino” means both ‘a crevasse/canyon’ and ‘vulva’.
Okay, I can see how the known meaning of /tinay/, ‘go inside backwards’, might have been used by Native folks in reference to a canyon — perhaps in a metaphorical reference to entering a traditional house. But I’d think any Settlers who were hearing this word lacked that refined degree of Sahaptin knowledge. Instead it seems sensible in my view that Indigenous people would have pointed out & discussed a single place that happened to have this name Tináynu.
And it’s no huge leap of imagination to suppose Settlers connected this name (inaccurately, from a Sahaptin perspective) with the naughtier word tanáy.
Bonus fact:
I’m beginning to wonder if Umatilla Sahaptin tanáy might historically come from a neighboring Salish language. We know there’s been a lot of Sahaptin & Salish contact (other groups were involved, too) for centuries in that mid-Columbia River region.
One reason I’m wondering about this is the Umatilla word I mentioned, tináy[-]načt ‘back in, go inside backwards’. I haven’t been able to figure out what the /načt/ portion of it means — but it happens to look very much like the widely occurring Salish lexical suffix for ‘rear end, butt, etc.’, -nač. That suffix is known to have previously had the form -nak, until some sound changes took place in various Salish languages.
And I see that the Umatilla Sahaptin word tanáy ‘vagina’ corresponds to the Northern Sahaptin form tanák. Could that word possibly have come from Salish influence, at least in part? Historical contact between Sahaptian and Salish languages is known to have gone on for centuries.
The Umatilla dictionary points out that there’s a separate Umatilla word for ‘vagina’, šaʔáx̣, clearly cognate with seʔeq in the sister language Nez Perce, and therefore apparently ancient.
