More causes for híhi ‘laughter’
Chinook Jargon’s word meaning (fundamentally I think) ‘to laugh’ as well as ‘to play’ and the noun ‘(some) fun’ is híhi.
The excellent 2012 dictionary from the Grand Ronde Tribes gives an etymology for this word, suggesting it’s “usually attributed to English” — thus from heehee.
All right. But that’s a rather marginal form in English — one that I can doubt played any great role in the formation of early Chinook Jargon. A glimpse at Google Ngram Viewer, comparing every written form of laughter sounds that I can think of (heehee, hee hee, haha, ha ha, hawhaw, haw haw, teehee, tee hee) indicates that “haha” and “ha ha” have predominated since the earliest time CJ could have had English influence.)
Image credit: Facebook
But GR 2012 also notes, very appropriately, that there are quite similar-sounding particles (uninflected words) in Lower Chinookan (i.e. Clatsop-Shoalwater) and Kathlamet Chinookan, the two farthest downstream languages of that family.
That dictionary also notes há há há ‘sound of laughing’ and (perhaps relevant) həhəhəhə ‘sound of groaning’ in Clackamas Chinookan, the next upstream sister language.
Today, I’d like to add several related observations from the Chinookan family.
To find these, I checked for various forms of English ‘laugh’, ‘giggle’, ‘chuckle’, ‘titter’, and so on in the documentation of the sister languages.
I found no cognates of hihi in the farthest upstream Chinookan language, Kiksht/Wishram.
In Kiksht, Clackamas, and Kathlamet, there are separate cognate inflected verb stems (not particles) for ‘laugh’ and ‘laugh at somebody’. (Clackamas (Jacobs 1958 (II):529) has an example using both near each other.)
There’s also a ‘giggle’ stem in Clackamas (II):398, as well as a particle lə′š ‘a noise of girlish giggling’ (I):266.
And, from Clackamas, let’s add in some further cognates of the Chinook Jargon form, because it’s this language that has the largest number of known forms resembling hihi:
- hahi′ ‘[laughter sound]’ Jacobs 1958 (I):131,
- hahe′ʔyana ‘they [Sky Cannibal Girls] are giggling [/sound of this]’ Jacobs 1958 (I):159,
- hahaheyʔana (no ′ stress mark) ‘[sound of women giggling & laughing]’ Jacobs 1958 (II):465,
- hə′hə′hə′hə′hə′ ‘[sound of a male laughing]’ Jacobs 1958 (II):526
Instead of the fully inflected stems seen in the sister languages, Lower Chinookan seems to only have its particle hihi (+ ‘do’) for ‘laugh’ (thus essentially the same structure as CW mamuk-hihi / munk-hihi).
This raises the question of whether Lower Chinookan was already heavily influenced by its daughter Chinuk Wawa, by about 1890 when speaker Q’ltí (Charles Cultee) worked with linguist Franz Boas. For comparison, all known Lower Chehalis Salish speakers, from Q’ltí onwards — he’s the earliest one we can judge from — display significant CW influence on their Salish.
Lower Chinookan also has a particle for ‘tittering [sound]’ on page 177 of Cultee-Boas 1894, L¡L¡L¡L¡. (Apparently this would be t’ɬt’ɬt’ɬt’ɬ in Grand Ronde-style spelling, or /ƛ̓ƛ̓ƛ̓ƛ̓/ to a linguist).
All told, it looks to me as if Chinuk Wawa’s hihi does come primarily from Lower Chinookan influence, with perhaps a bit of reinforcement from neighboring Kathlamet. Clackamas has similar but nonetheless quite distinct forms from hihi.
Our one caveat is that it looks possible that Lower Chinookan was massively influenced by Chinuk Wawa. So we might not have here a the customary, simple, one-way path that we’re used to when we look at etymologies in the languages of the world.
