Alta na mayka nanich?
Last night, working through a section of the incalculably precious Joe Peter recordings from 1941 in Central-Dialect Chinuk Wawa, we were stumped by a sentence that we kept hearing as…
Image credit: Slideserve
mayka na mayka nanich?
you YNQ you see
‘Do you see it?’
(YNQ = yes/no question.)
Our group has a very good collective sense of Chinook Jargon grammar, and we found this really odd.
For one thing, it’s rare for subject pronouns to get repeated in that dialect of Jargon, unless you’re doing it for “emphasis”, heavily topicalizing that person. If the speaker had meant to ask “Is it you that sees it?”, the above sentence would be cool. Joe Peter didn’t meant that. It’s uncool.
I need to tell you, in case you’re thinking of joining the Joe Peter group on Discord on Tuesday nights (you’re invited) — the audio quality can be really terrible on these old recordings.
So we were just getting more and more puzzled as we listened several times.
But then, something in me realized, even in the Northern Dialect, where folks do repeat subject pronouns, they don’t normally repeat pronouns in questions. New discovery!
And just like that, I started hearing the first word as alta ‘now’, and it all made sense:
alta na mayka nanich?
now YNQ you see?
‘Now do you see it?’
And it’s perfectly fine (in Central and Southern dialects) to question alta ‘now’, by following it with na.
Mystery solved.
