Boas 1892: Many discoveries in a short article (Part 26: ‘losing/missing…’
Here’s yet another of the things about Chinuk Wawa that researcher Franz Boas was the first to notice.
(A link to all installments in this series)
Image credit: Shutterstock
He published a dense collection of these notes in an 1892 Science article.
To lose the way, tseepie wayhut [t’sípi úyxat] ([Horatio] Hale, p. 60), is not used on Shoalwater Bay, tseepie meaning only, to miss an aim.
I would just add that t’sípi also has, in all dialects, the generic meaning of ‘be mistaken, make a mistake, go wrong’. It’s quite a frequently used verb.
You might not catch that broad meaning from how the superb 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary defines the word — as ‘to miss’ and ‘to misspeak’. Some of the example sentences from Grand Ronde elders, though, are what I would definitely take as ‘to make a mistake’.
I have questions about how Franz Boas asked Shoalwater Bay people about the phrase t’sípi úyxat. I really think they would’ve understood it if he’d used it in context, for instance *nayka t’sípi úyxat* ‘I lost the way’. Did he ask them instead about *ixt t’sípi úyxat* ‘a (one particular) wrong way’, which would sound weird to most speakers? (See below about adjective uses of t’sípi.)
Plus:
There’s also the causative form of this root, mamuk-t’sípi, which would presumably be munk-t’sípi at Grand Ronde. (But it’s not in their dictionary.) That’s literally ‘make (someone) be wrong’, so it gets used for ‘tricking’ someone.
Bonus fact:
Just once in the 250 or so issues of BC’s historic Chinook Jargon newspaper Kamloops Wawa do I find the phrase cipi oihat. (That’s the Chinuk Pipa alphabet’s spelling of t’sípi úyxat.)
And that phrase happens to show us another syntactic use of t’sípi that Boas doesn’t mention: as an adjective, not a verb. The sentence I’m referring to is “O taii, tlus wik maika iskom cipi oihat.” That’s “Oh chief, don’t take the wrong path.”
In fact the use of t’sípi as an adjective is pretty common, in Kamloops Wawa. For the pattern just shown, adjectives modifying a following noun, I’ve also found cipi tomtom and cipi wawa. So that’s not super frequent…
…But much more often, I see people being described as being cipi. That is, with adjectival predicates (stative verbs), as in cipi klaska ‘they’re wrong’. Just think how often in English we talk about “the wrong way”, “the wrong thing”, “you’re wrong”, and so on.
This is a useful expression to learn!
