Ikta Dale McCreery yaka t’ɬap (Part 16: Fast? Big?)
Looking through a number of observations made by our friend Dr Dale McCreery from where he lives up on BC’s central coast…
Image credit: xkcd
Here’s one from March 21, 2014 that he posted in the Facebook “Chinook Jargon” group.
naika tikh hayas – either – “take it easy”, or as I see it, maybe “I want it fast” ?
It’s the punch line for a fairly explicit short story about someone.
Sounds like “nayka tik hayas” or nayka tikh hayas, the -h after t sounds like a normal release in Nuxalk.
This is me, Dave R talking again:
I’ll just explain that Nuxalk is the Salish-family language of the area of Bella Coola, BC.
If we take the words Dale quotes at their face value, what we have here is Naika tikki haiyas, ‘I want a big one’.
Dale, from context that he didn’t describe to us, instead took this as intending Naika tikki Ø aiyak, ‘I want it fast’.
(Both of these valid possibilities strike me as being real different from ‘Take it easy’. Hmm.)
Anyway, among rememberers of Chinook Jargon from years gone by, it is indeed common to find a confusion between the words for ‘big’ and ‘fast’. Heck, some Settlers who heard the language every day used to mix those two words up!
(Hey, they’re both intense qualities!)
Much as folks would confuse maika ‘you’ with naika ‘I’.
(Hey, they’re both personal pronouns! (For singular speech-act-participants!))
An ironic situation in a language that only has a few hundred morphemes (or “words”, in a less accurate phrasing)! I still think Chinuk Wawa is less difficult than the Scream Cipher…
