Why < na.wi.tka > in BC Chinook Writing?
And, why does < u > have 2 different shapes in BC Chinook Writing?
The two questions are related, I think.
Called Chinuk Pipa in Northern Chinook Jargon, this endangered alphabet (which we’re bringing back to life in a big way!) has a couple of quirks that we’ve long wondered about.
I think that, 30 years into researching it, I may have come to some insights.
Quirk #1: Chinuk Pipa‘s letter for the sound “u” has 2 different shapes. The basic, canonical form is like a clock face with just one hand on it:
(Thanks to David Corbett for his online Chinuk Pipa keyboard!)
And the other form, used when the < u > is connected to another letter, is:
ɷ (a Unicode approximation),
as in:
which is < kuk > ‘to cook’.
The issue that comes up is that the Chinuk Pipa letter for < wi > and < we > looks very much like that alternate and much more frequent form of < u >; have a look:
as in:
which would be how you’d write < kwik >, e.g. in demonstrating the pronunciation of English ‘quick’.
Quirk #2 now: the frequent Chinook Jargon word nawitka ‘yes; indeed; truly’ has a weird syllabification in the standardized Chinuk Pipa spelling:
which is < na.wi.tka >.
We might have expected *< na.wit.ka >*… So why is the < wi > all by itself when we write < nawitka >?
Which is to say, why did someone choose to leave a syllable < tka > out there at the end?
That’s actually a perfectly OK syllable in the local Salish languages of BC, but still we’re not used to seeing a vowel letter of Chinuk Pipa all by itself in a word.
My idea of why the syllabification as < na.wi.tka > was picked is, it’s the clearest possible way to write the word, if you’re following the rule of breaking words into syllables.
You certainly can just connect all the letters together, as < nawitka >. (Sorry, I don’t have a visual illustration of this for you.) But that’s not the normal way to write in Chinuk Pipa.
Let me demonstrate to you how similar < na.wit.ka > (which is also a valid way to write the word) looks to *< na.ut.ka >*:
na.wit.ka
versus
*na.ut.ka*
(Fun fact, those really do look 99% similar — the middle syllable could’ve been written upside-down from what you see, in either of the cases.)
Here’s where I remind you that there aren’t all that many unique words in Chinook Jargon, so in fact there’s scant chance of someone being confused for very long by any of the spellings you’ve seen.
But it seems clear to me that at the early stage of designing Chinuk Pipa to be easily learned and used by Indigenous people who had never previously read or written, “someone” (Father JMR Le Jeune) realized that the very clearest possible way to write nawitka was as < na.wi.tka >.
Does that make sense to you?
I looked for other words containing “wit” to find evidence for or against this hypothesis. It’s hard to find good examples. “Mit.wit” and “kwit.sha.ti” are written without splitting “wit”.
“Wit” and “ut” don’t look that similar: “wi” connects to “t” in the short inner stroke whereas “u” connects to “t” on the outside. There are enough near-ambiguities in the script that I doubt Le Jeune would have specifically tried to disambiguate this one, which isn’t even really ambiguous.
Another possibility is that he started writing the syllable with “wi” counterclockwise (the usual way, though suboptimal in this context) but then broke the syllable there to avoid “wit” looking like “wat”. I have no evidence for this.
“Na.wi.tka” is sometimes written “na.wi.ti.ka”. Is it possible that it was perceived as four syllables, and that “na.wi.tka” represents a pronunciation with a very reduced third vowel?
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