Boas 1892: Many discoveries in a short article (Part 24: ‘at that time’…or is it really ‘up to that time’?)

Still another “first” in Prof. Franz Boas’s brief 1892 article on “The Chinook Jargon“…

As always, we’re able to get an extraordinary amount of information out of a single Chinuk Wawa word, when it’s documented by someone as knowledgeable and reliable as Boas was. 

Image credit: English Experts

It was “first” because it hadn’t shown up in previous dictionaries of Chinuk Wawa.

(Click here for the previous installments in this series.)

Here’s how Boas presents today’s word:

One expression which is not found in the published vocabularies,
and which is unknown on Columbia River, was obtained on the
Siletz Reservation, Oregon: at that time, kôpa kᵘoâ’Et.

This introduced the word that we find in the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes’ dictionary as qwét ‘extent, up to, reaching; time of’, with the above expression as a subentry kʰupa qwét ‘at that time’. 

Sounds:

I’m not entirely sure of my transcription as kᵘoâ’Et. There’s a possibility that it’s meant as k′oâ’Et,  with an ejective /k’/ or /q’/, but that is unlikely, considering what we know about its Chinookan etymology. (Much of which is from Boas’s own data; see the 2012 dictionary as well as Boas 1910:617ff where you can see resemblances with the “demonstrative pronouns”.)

And, a definite surprise in Boas’s published form of this word is its stressed vowel being ~ /a/ rather than /e/. It’s only known with front vowels /e/ ~ /i/ in all of the data other than Boas’s. So, this may be another typographical mistake by the non-Jargon-speaking editors and/or typesetters for Science magazine. Probably, Boas’s manuscript used a spelling k′oä’Et, where his frequently used German-style ä would in fact be a front vowel /æ/.

TLDR: a different potential analysis, which I want to discard here:

Boas’s phonetics are shown with the a-circumflex (â) symbol. What if it’s exactly the symbol he meant to use?

This â is a notation that he and some of his students (such as AF Chamberlain) employed for a lip-rounded low-back vowel sound. It seems to have corresponded to something like the English-language caught, as it’s said in many British and northeastern USA dialects; often we notate this vowel sound like [ɔ]. Such a sound, in Pacific Northwest languages, typically reflects a phonemic (“underlying”) /ə/ adjacent to a lip-rounded (“labialized”) consonant.

In this case, the /qʷ/ next door would handily turn /ə/ into [ɔ].

So far, so good…

Now, we’ve seen several times how a stressed /ə́/ in Lower Chehalis Salish (a frequent donor of vocabulary to Chinuk Wawa, and an influencer at Grand Ronde Reservation) was turned by speakers of that language into /í/, for what appears to be an emotional effect. Those speakers did the same with Chinook Jargon words, such as the Nuučaan̓uɬ (Vancouver Island, Canada)-sourced, emotionally-neutral kə́mtəks ‘to know (etc.)’, creating the emotionally-charged kímtəks ‘to feel deeply about, regard, respect’.

In principle, it would be possible that today’s word was pronounced more like *qwə́t in Chinuk Wawa down at Siletz Reservation in Oregon, and up at Grand Ronde Rez became phonemic /qwít/, which for PNW Coast Indigenous speakers would be phonetically our [qwét].

BUT! It would be a bit bizarre for a Columbia River Chinookan word *qwə́t to have taken root in Jargon way down at Siletz, and then later get mutated in sound up at Grand Ronde. My point is that that would be an unnecessarily complicated hypothesis. Two big reasons:

• Chinookan languages were spoken closer to Grand Ronde than to Siletz anyway, and played a much bigger role in shaping Chinoook Jargon at GR than at Siletz. 
• Also, we have little to no evidence of Siletz Chinuk Wawa having had much of an influence on how Grand Ronde Chinuk Wawa was spoken.
• And, all of the evidence from both earlier CJ and the Chinookan languages themselves shows that today’s word always already had a front vowel ~ /e/ in it. There’s no motivation for imagining an earlier “schwa” sound in it.

Usage:

The only other use yet known of qwét besides (on its own) meaning ‘reaching up to’ (and in the phrase kʰupa qwét said to mean ‘at that time’), is sitkum-qwét ‘halfway, partway’. 

Which dialect is this word from? It’s from what I’ve come to call the 1st of the 3 dialects of Chinook Jargon, the Central one, i.e. the early-creolized, lower Columbia River variety.

It got used, also, in what I call the Southern dialect, that is, the later, re-creolized, variety centered on Grand Ronde, Oregon.

I want to suggest we speculate that this word qwét may also have influenced the 3rd dialect, the Northern variety that characterizes British Columbia.

Even though we don’t find any recognizable form of this word there, we still see in the northern Chinook Jargon spoken by priests there a pretty interesting parallel: a phrase …pi q’o’ kopa… (literally ‘…and arriving at…’), meaning ‘until’. We haven’t yet found non-priests using that phrase. The reason I’m intrigued by that usage distribution is that in the north, it’s the priest’s Jargon and nobody else’s that reflects a direct Southern Dialect heritage. 

So it seems possible to me that qwét may have been known by earlier generations of Jargon-speaking priests from their time around the Columbia River. And then — it may have gotten folk-etymologized once they wound up working in the North, in places such as British Columbia where qwét was unknown but the similar-sounding (and meaning) q’o’ is common. 

Bonus fact:

Narrowing down the meaning:

I want to direct your attention to Boas’s translation of kʰupa qwét as meaning ‘at that time’.

We always have to reckon with the fact that he was speaking primarily Chinuk Wawa with his Indigenous experts. In this case it was someone at Siletz Reservation in Oregon, where CW was still the predominant language when he visited (in 1890 as I recall). It’s striking to me that Boas doesn’t supply a meaning for the word qwét on its own; perhaps he was unsure about that, so he provides us just the entire phrase kʰupa qwét. 

I’d bet you that the expert speaker, when Boas asked for clarification, paraphrased kʰupa qwét to Boas like this: kʰupa úkuk tʰáym. That 3-word phrase certainly can mean ‘at that time’.

But, because kʰupa is a preposition of very many senses, that’s also how you’d phrase ‘(up) to that time; until that time’! This would be a better fit with everything else we know about qwét.

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?