How to say “the X-er, the better” (it’s kinda artificial, though!)
Bluntly:
Pus ilip kol chok, ilip tlus.
‘The colder the water, the better.’
— Kamloops Wawa #167 (August 1898), page 117 “From Mgr. Kneipp’s Water Cure”
That’s literally saying, “If the water’s colder, it’s better.”
Two reasons why this is a pretty artificial way of talking, though:
- In the Northern Dialect (of Kamloops), hardly any Native speakers would say *ilip kol* to express “cold-er”. (The comparative degree.) They’d just leave out the ilip. Trust me. All we have proof of is, they did say ilip tlus for ‘better’. It’s like ilip tlus was a frozen, a fossilized, even an irregular expression in the North…
- And I claim that “the X-er, the better” is something you say in Indo-European languages. Like the French, and probably the Breton, that Father Le Jeune who wrote the above sentence grew up talking. I’ve never stumbled across folks spontaneously using such expressions in Chinuk Wawa, or in other Pacific NW languages. So the phrase above is a White thing to say 😒
But kaltash ukuk (that doesn’t matter)!
If you said something like pus íləp-kʰúl tsə́qw, íləp-ɬúsh (Grand Ronde spellings there), you would be understood very well.
I dunno about this one Dave.
Even if it’s more of a white guy thing / southern thing to say, “ilip x” for “more x” is a thing you find being said around lots of places. You don’t really find people white people duplicating pronouns (naika chako tlus naika tomtom) or using a plural iaka. A plural 3rd person pronoun isn’t something that you find in some Indigenous languages, but it is certainly part of Chinook and a correct way to talk.
Fundamentally, what is the logic for claiming that one is more correct Chinook than the other? Who’s to say this isn’t an intrusion from Shuswap etc grammar rather than some fundamental part of Northern Chinook Jargon? I understand Le Jeune perfectly fine here.
Also, it could just be an absence of evidence for the comparative rather than it actually not being understood or used at all by Indigenous speakers. Clearly encountered that type of construction a lot in the Kamloops Wawa and when talking to settlers (who keep putting it in their dictionaries).
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All good points, naika wawa masi kopa maika.
I think between the Indigenous letters and “Kamloops Wawa” we have an enormous amount of examples (on the order of 1 million words) of how to make oneself understood in Chinook Jargon.
The doubling of subject pronouns is almost certainly a Secwépemc ethnic thing, more than it’s anything else — much as the use of yaka to mean “it” is more Settler.
I do believe Jargon-speaking people largely understood each other well, regardless of these variations. It is a fairly forgiving language, albeit one that’s much more complex than previously realized.
I hope I was clear in my post here that I do think folks did understood this “the more the better” phrasing.
At the same time, it seems my reading about the languages of the world indicates that such expressions are kind of rare, and are pretty recent innovations, for example varying too widely within Indo-European to be a very old, commonly inherited structure.
(Another linguistic feature that as a rule is typically pretty new, albeit widespread in the world, is “evidentiality” marking.)
So it’s not so much a matter of “correct” Chinook Jargon as educating people about the best practices & the ways various things get expressed in CJ. To the extent, as you say, that we even have data on those things.
One of the most important questions for me in any language is: would real speakers actually say such-and-such a thing? The answer is always interesting.
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