Northern Chinook Jargon: Do “go” and “come” only encode destinations?
Cutting to the chase:
Unlike the Southern (and I believe the older Central) Dialect of the language, it seems like the Northern CJ motion verbs klatwa & chako — those are their Kamloops Wawa spellings — only refer to where the motion is aimed.
Where Chinook winds come from (image credit: KOAA)
They mean, respectively, “go to” and “come to”.
This is in the usage of the big collection of Indigenous-written Chinuk Pipa letters, mostly written in the 1890s.
Not once in those tens of thousands of words have I found anyone saying something clearly meaning “to come from” a place!
That’s a big difference from
(A) how the priests talked & wrote Northern CJ, and
(B) relatedly, how Southern & Central CJ work. No coincidence there, because the Catholic missionaries in BC had been trained by earlier generations of priests, who had previously worked farther south, using those other dialects.
And we have letters from the archives showing those missionaries discussing how Northern CJ sounded rather different to them!
The closest thing I seem to be able to find to saying “come from” are sentences like this in an Indigenous letter:
Kah maika iskom hwiski?
where you pick.up whiskey
‘Where did you get booze?’
— Louis James, Spuzzum, BC
And I believe, based on good evidence, that Northern CJ therefore asks Kah maika ilihi? (‘Where is your home place?’) to express ‘Where are you from?’
Some of that evidence: the expression NNNN iaka ilihi ‘her/his home place is NNNN’, very frequently accompanies mentions of people. There’s a strong orientation to your ilihi, your ‘home place’, in NCJ. And I’ve seen Kah maika ilihi? a number of times in the Kamloops Wawa newspaper.
In the Southern Dialect, by which I mean modern Grand Ronde, Oregon, we can say qʰá mayka cháku? for ‘Where do you come from? / Where are you from?’ But I haven’t found a single occurrence of that way of asking, in the Northern Dialect, from the Indigenous people’s letters.
The wrinkle:
Separately from asking where someone came from, there’s also the issue of how to make a relative clause for the place “where you came from”. I haven’t found any occurrences of this, either, in the Indigenous people’s letters.
Kamloops Wawa will habitually say …(kopa) kah maika chako, ‘…(to) where you came from’, effectively the same as in Southern Dialect.
But here too I believe a good Northern CJ speaker would spontaneously say …kopa maika ilihi, ‘to your home place’.
I remember some non-kamloops wawa examples of “kah maika ilihi” as well. For example, a settler asks “kah mika ilahie?” in that ‘Indian Bob’ clipping – https://chinookjargon.com/2021/08/05/1923-indian-bob-and-city-folks-amnesia/
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It’s great to be taught that difference. I would surely have tended to use “chako”, naturally focusing on the verb as we are used to in English, German, also in French and many other European languages. “Kah maika ilihi(?)” is a highly useful phrase.
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