Taking liwan ‘rib(s)’ earlier
We know a word for ‘rib(s)’ in Chinook Jargon; now we can say more about it.
In the best dictionary of the language that’s been published yet, the 2012 book from the Grand Ronde Tribes, this word is líwan.
Georg Friedrich Telemann, for a reason (image credit: Wikipedia)
It’s also known at least as early as Demers, Blanchet, and St Onge (1871; data from about 1838) in the spelling < lewan >.
The source of this word, as for so many body-part words in Jargon, is the Chinookan languages. Grand Ronde 2012 cites relevant forms having the stem liwan in Clackamas and in Clatsop Lower Chinookan.
I would add the negative evidence that such a stem isn’t apparent in the published data on Kiksht/Wishram/Wasco Upper Chinookan, nor in Kathlamet Lower Chinookan.
I would also contribute a comment that perhaps the earliest known form of this Chinuk Wawa word is documented in the spelling < telleman >, by Alexander Ross in his 1849 book (data from 1810-1813), with a plural translation, ‘ribs’.
That’s probably from Lower Chinookan, which contributed the vast bulk of the Chinookan vocabulary in CW.
Do you see the family resemblance? This < telleman > surely is Chinookan t-liman.
The t- is the Chinookan Neuter (and/or Indefinite) Noun prefix.
The liman stem form is “the same thing as” our liwan. The reason this is true is that Lower Chinookan is very well known as freely alternating between “W” and “M” (and also “B”) sounds. All of these “bilabials” function as essentially a single phoneme — there’s not necessarily any difference in the meaning of a word if you substitute “W” and “M” (and “B”) back and forth.
A reason why it’s worth our time to recognize this early form, < telleman >, is that it illustrates a pattern that was common in the earliest Chinook Jargon.
Way back then, lots & lots of Chinookan words got adopted into the new pidgin CJ with plenty of the normal Chinookan prefixes & suffixes still attached to them.
Only after a generation or so did CJ speakers routinely recognize those extra bits, and strip them away, giving us simpler, easier Jargon words — like the current form of ‘rib(s)’, liwan.
Could it be from les flancs? Dogribs, the colonial name for Tlicho, were called Flancs des Chiens in French.
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Good hypothesis, nayka wawa masi. I’d have a hard time accepting it unless the Chinook Jargon form were (by analogy with pʰasáy[-]uks < “français”) more like lipa or lipla, with CJ’s predictable vowel denasalization. And even then, voiceless /p/ doesn’t alternate much with the other bilabials, voiced /b, w, m/, in Lower Chinookan, the most overt Indigenous influencing language in Fort Vancouver times — which I invoke because Francophone influence isn’t readily perceivable until then.
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