CA: a Yurok etymology for alíkʰuchik ‘dentalium’?

Let me echo the sentiments of Bright and Olmsted!

It’s wonderful that more materials keep becoming available on the Indigenous languages of our region, enabling us to research deeper and smarter.

White people’s dentalium, I’m guessing (image credit: Salty Girl)

That’s more or less what the introduction says in “A Shasta Vocabulary” by William Bright and D.L. Olmsted (Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 20:1-55, 1959.)

And now that I’ve found that vocabulary easily downloadable online, it’s helping with a discovery or two.

Here’s a nifty one: Shasta uses a word for traditional money that we know also in Chinuk Wawa:

money, Indian (beads). /ʔawkʷaci•k SS [the speaker Sargent Sambo] (from local English “allicocheek“, derived from Yurok ʔo•ɬ ‘Indian’, ci•k ‘money’)

If Shasta speakers felt sure this is a foreign word, that’s valuable information in itself.

It also says a lot that “allicocheek” is a locally used word in English, presumably by Indigenous people.

In the Yurok dictionary I find ‘oohl ‘we-cheeek ‘Indian money’ (as well as ‘woogey ‘we-cheeek ‘White money’):

• ‘oohl ‘person, people, Indian, Yurok Indian’
• ‘we- ‘her/his = 3rd person possessive’
  (my interpretation, based on many forms found in the dictionary)
• cheeek ‘dentalium money, money in general’
• (‘woogey ‘be holy, former people, white man, white people, at first identified with former people’)

It’s not implausible to phonologically map Yurok ʔo•ɬ we-ci•k (making an educated guess about that we-) onto Shasta ʔawkʷaci•k, using Bright & Olmsted’s style of spelling: 

YUROK     SHASTA

ʔo•ɬ           ʔaw

we-           kʷa

ci•k          ci•k

This mapping works best when you’re going *from* Yurok *to* Shasta. Going the other direction, it would be hard to explain the intrusion of a /ɬ/ sound into the Shasta word to get the Yurok form. On page 2 of Bright & Olmsted’s Shasta dictionary, we see that Shasta has no /ɬ/, so it couldn’t replicate that Yurok sound, and neither does it have a /l/ sound. Give us linguists a moment to nerd out about how cool it is to find a language with no laterals!

Plus — and this is even more important — the Yurok form is actually built from parts that are meaningful in Yurok. We have no indication that the Shasta form literally means anything such as “Indian money” using Shasta morphemes.

So it’s certain that Chinuk Wawa’s word alíkʰuchik for ‘dentalium’ ultimately goes back to a Yurok source. This is the first and only Yurok word that we know to have entered into the Jargon outside of Yurok territory! Add this as the etymology in your copy of the brilliant 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary of CW.

I would hypothesize that speakers of still other Indigenous languages of that area (northern California & far southern Oregon) heard the Shasta pronunciation of the Yurok term, and reverse-engineered it as “those guy’s accent” for an intended *ʔalkʷaci•k. With a voiced /l/. Unlike the actual original Yurok term with its voiceless /ɬ/!

Alternatively, alíkʰuchik preserves how some other Indigenous language or languages than Shasta said the Yurok word in their own unique accent.

Either way, the Jargon word appears to be a foreign-accented rendition of the original Yurok form.

This makes it comparable with the Nuuchahnulth-sourced words in Chinuk Wawa, which famously show English-language influence.

I wish we knew which syllable was stressed in that Shasta “local English” allicocheek. It would also be good to be able to hear the original Yurok phrase spoken aloud; I suspect there’s been a very foreign stress shift during the borrowing process.

íkta mayka chaku-kə́mtəks?
Ikta maika chako-kumtuks? 
What have you learned?
And, can you express it in Chinuk Wawa?