“mank” as an adverb?, and variation in the earliest, Central dialect

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I just put up a post here about the “Ave Maria” (Hail Mary) prayer as preserved in H-T Lempfrit’s notebook, and it included an odd use of mank-.

Image credit: IMDB

That’s the Comparative prefix that goes directly onto adjective and adverb stems, as in these examples from the Demers, Blanchet, and St Onge dictionary of similar vintage (with its data from about 1838):

Mank, more.
[mank-]tlush,
[mank-]elip tlush, better. (more used.)

This mank-, in the oldest, “Central” dialect of Chinuk Wawa, was apparently the main way of expressing that something was ‘more’ good/small/heavy/old etc.

It’s the ancestor of the Southern dialect (Grand Ronde, Oregon) prefix mánaqi-, so it may have actually been pronounced manq-.

(The word íləp (spelled elip above), which went on to replace it, especially in the Northern dialect, seems to have primarily & near-exclusively meant ‘(at) first’, at the time of the D-B-St O dictionary.) 

Now to get around to why I’m discussing mank-.

I said that this prefix attaches directly onto a stem, with nothing intervening.

But in his version of the “Hail Mary”, to express ‘you are better’, Lempfrit has the unexpected wording < mank maika tlosh > ‘more you good’ — where the normal structure would be *< mank-tlosh maika >.

It’s as if he were using mank as a freestanding adverb for ‘more’, rather than as a prefix! Huh.

The full-text search that’s available to me as I write this away from my own personal library shows only one use of mank(-) in the D-B-St O dictionary, when I go looking for comparisons…and that use is in the same prayer, the “Hail Mary”! There, they have the wording as the normal < mank tlush maïka >. (As they spell it.)

So:

  • Did Lempfrit make a small mistake in copying out that prayer from (I suspect) the notebooks of Demers?
  • Or was mank also an adverb word on its own sometimes, back in Central Dialect times?
  • I’ve had a peek at my files of L-N St Onge’s manuscript dictionary of Central Dialect, circa 1870s, and that particular authority seems to have (in his spellings) elip for the Comparative prefix, and (similar to the “more used” Comparative above) elip-mank for the Superlative. 

So there may have been a good deal of variation going on in this corner of Chinook Jargon grammar, in the earliest decades.

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?

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