“Doing God knows what” is real different in Chinook Jargon
Listening to a podcast in American English, I was struck by a phrase used: “doing God knows what“.
That’s a concept that we say in a rather different way in Chinuk Wawa.
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When we’re talking English, saying “doing God knows what” makes the “God knows what” serve as a noun, the direct object.
The English “God knows” part functions like an adjective, modifying that noun “what“.
Now, in the Jargon, “God knows what” / “who knows what” / “who the heck knows what” / “goodness knows what” is said as t’ɬúnas(-)íkta (Southern spelling) ~ tl’oonas(-)ikta (Northern spelling in the BC learners alphabet).
And that t’ɬúnas ~ tl’oonas is not an adjective in Chinook Jargon. It’s a discourse marker, something like saying “I dunno” or “I reckon” in English.
Discourse markers have to come at the start of a clause/sentence in Chinuk Wawa.
So the CJ phrase t’ɬúnas(-)íkta ~ tl’oonas(-)ikta is really a whole different thing from the English “God knows what“.
It’s more literally saying ‘I figure there’s something’.
And we have to say the Chinook phrase first, so it comes before the verb that it’s an object of. We say t’ɬúnas(-)íkta yaka múnk ~ t’ɬúnas(-)íkta yaka mámuk ~ tl’oonas(-)ikta yaka mamook, ‘she/he is/was doing God knows what’. (Literally ‘I figure there’s something that she/he was/is doing’.)
Even though we are able to say yaka munk ikta ~ yaka mamuk ikta ~ yaka mamook ikta for ‘she/he is/was doing something’ — putting the object ‘something’ after the verb, as is standard in the Jargon — we’re forced into a different wording if we want to get as speculative as ‘God only knows’.
It’s yet another way that Chinuk Wawa is a totally different language of its own!
Oh, and if you really need a more exact parallel to the subordinate clause “doing God knows what“, you can leave out the subject pronoun (yaka above).
