Are ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ ever Adjectives in Chinook Jargon?
Are ‘fast’ & ‘slow’ ever Adjectives in Chinuk Wawa? Nope.
The world’s best CW dictionary yet, published in 2012 by the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, agrees that ayaq ‘fast’ is an adverb (also a verb), not an adjective.
Image credit: slowboat.com
And it offers just a single example for the idea that the antonym, ɬawa ‘slow’, might serve as an adjective:
qʰanchi ɬawa mayka! ‘You’re so slow!’
But to this linguist’s mind, ɬawa there is a predicate, a stative verb. It’s not an adjective that you’d be able to use to modify a noun, as in the English-language phrase “a slow boat”.
The same is true about ayaq. We just don’t find the word for ‘fast’, either, in use modifying a following noun.
(I’ve also checked my other CTGR language materials, with the same results.)
One quick way that I’ve checked on this claim, using my files of 27 years of the old Kamloops Wawa newspaper, was to do a search on the phrases “iht aiak” (‘a/one fast…’) and “ukuk aiak” (‘this/that fast…’ (Using the spellings from that paper.) No results.
Likewise when I searched both “iht tlawa” / “ukuk tlawa” (using the rarer Northern CJ word for ‘slow’) and “iht wik aiak” / “ukuk wik aiak” (using the normal NCJ expression for ‘slow’, literally ‘non-fast’). No results.
Bonus fact:
Something similar can be pointed out for two other descriptive concepts in the Jargon:
- kíkwəli is primarily an adverb. Again, CTGR 2012 shows a single example suggestive of an adjective-like use: …pus ma kíkwəli ‘for you to be at the very bottom’, from the same speaker as the above qʰanchi ɬawa mayka. Again I see a predicative use there, ‘to be low/below’.
- It’s actually very hard to find any modifying-adjective uses of kíkwəli in that Southern dialect.
- In the Northern dialect, such uses are rare but prominent, including (in Kamloops Wawa‘s spellings) kikuli haws ‘the traditional pit house’ and perhaps kikuli-tomtom ‘to be humble’, literally ‘low-hearted’. {I have questions about -təmtəm expressions…)
- sáx̣ali ‘high’ also clearly can be used in a predicative way, ‘to be high up’ and so on, but there’s not an abundance in CTGR 2012 of clearly adjectival, modifier, uses.
- We do find sáx̣ali-íliʔi, a nice old (Central dialect also) phrase for ‘hill country; the mountains’.
- In the Northern dialect we can find a few such, including sahali haws ‘a tall building’.
- (Beware: in all dialects, sáx̣ali-táyí ‘God’ and sáx̣ali-smúk ‘clouds, fog, etc.’ can be more reliably taken as noun+noun compounds: ‘sky-chief’ and ‘sky-smoke’.)
