A remembered mid-Columbia River CJ word helps prove etymologies
Here’s a nice, serendipitous find that confirms some conclusions we’d already reached using the available evidence.
Here’s what I’m referring to…
Dog and black bear (image credit: Newsweek)
Barbara P. Harris and Andrea R. Giles.1991. An annotated list of the acquisitions and holdings of the Chinook Jargon Project at the University of Victoria. (Papers of the 1991 International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages, pages 129-181.)
In that conference paper, Jim Luthy of Juneau, Alaska, is noted as having contacted the researchers and provided them with a list of words his dad had written down from experience of life on the middle Columbia River. There are no big surprises in that list, except for the following 2 words:
- ‘dog’, < cussey > — I pretty quickly recognized this as being from Sahaptin, which also gets called the Yakama / Yakima / Umatilla / etc. language. There you’ll find k̓usik̓úsi for ‘dog’, a Diminutive formation from the word k̓úsi for ‘horse’. (For example in Noel Rude’s wonderful “Umatilla Dictionary”.) So Luthy Sr. was actually using a pidginized version of a Sahaptin word.
- ‘bear’, < skinqua > — This one, however, is not Sahaptian. Nor is it Salish, despite seeming to have the ever-popular Salish noun prefix s-!(*) Instead, it’s from yet another unrelated language of the middle Columbia, Kiksht / Wishram / Wasco Upper Chinookan. There you’ll find i[-]skínt[-]x̣ʷa for ‘black bear’.
Similar words for ‘black bear’ are found as you proceed down the Columbia River, in the sister languages Clackamas and Kathlamet.
But, in the farthest downstream sister language, Clatsop-Shoalwater Lower Chinookan, there’s no such word. Instead you’ll find the word i[-]ítsx̣ut, which gave us our well-known Chinook Jargon word for ‘black bear’, ítsx̣ut.
So you see, finding the obscure middle-Columbia CJ word < skinqua > for ‘bear’ leads to support for our understanding that the “regular” Chinuk Wawa word for it comes, specifically, from farthest lower Columbia Chinookan.
Bonus fact:
Why would middle Columbia CJ include novel words from such a variety of languages — Sahaptian and Chinookan, and almost certainly Salish (e.g. cayuse)?
Well, it’s precisely on the middle Columbia River, at places such as Celilo Falls/Wayam, that those 3 distinct groups (and a 4th, the also unrelated Paiute) came into regular contact. They influenced each other’s traditional languages.
It’s to be expected that they’d also make their mark on Chinook Jargon, once it was brought into their territories around the middle of the 1800s.
Bonus bonus fact:
Take note of that time frame. In my analysis of known facts, CJ didn’t exist before 1794, and didn’t get used beyond the Fort Vancouver area very much until both missionaries and Settlers came to the middle Columbia, circa 1840 onwards. Then there was a use for a contact language such as CJ.
During the three or four decades before that, communication between the already-present overland fur trade workers and the Indigenous middle Columbia folks was easily taken care of in the age-old traditional way, by intermarriage. Native women would marry the (usually) French-Canadian male HBC & NWC employees, and soon, you had chains of qualified interpreters to do the sporadic bartering that was typical of that phase of the region’s history.
But when Settlers and missionaries arrived, they stayed permanently. Suddenly there was a need to be able to directly and individually communicate with those folks. Thus, a sudden increase in Jargon use in the middle Columbia.
(*) Bonus bonus fact:
Chinookan i[-]skínt[-]x̣ʷa contains the Chinookan i- prefix for a Masculine Singular Noun, and the Traditional Characters’ Name suffix -x̣ʷa.
That leaves us with a stem, skínt, which contrary to what I said above, is likely to have come from Salish!
There’s a very recognizable word shared among the Interior Salish languages having this same pronunciation, reconstructible back to ancient Proto-Interior-Salish as *s-kínt, meaning ‘person’ (human being)’.
Remarkable how many cultures traditionally view bears as humans…
And remarkable how, yet again, we can show Salish influence on Chinookan languages going way back into the past.
