Why < nits > for ‘grandmother’ in St Onge’s handwritten dictionary?
L-N St Onge’s handwritten Chinook Jargon dictionary (Central Dialect) has the usual word for ‘grandmother’, < chich > / < chits >.
St Onge always writes the English translation of it as ‘grand-mother’, with a dash; I suppose that’s an influence from his first language, French, which writes grand-mère.
Nits? (image source: “Grandma Has Head Lice. Say What?!“)
But another form that St Onge gives for ‘grand-mother’ is < nits >. I haven’t seen that in any of the many Chinuk Wawa dictionaries.
Where did this novelty come from?
There’s every chance that it’s just a slip of the pen by St Onge. I’ve found that he misspelled words as often as you’d expect any human to do, although it’s most often in the English translations. So maybe he just meant to write < chits > here.
But this “n” at the start is suggestive of the 1st person singular possessive prefix, ‘my’, in both of the Indigenous parent languages of the Jargon. Compare these:
- n-gə́k̓i ‘my grandmother’ in Shoalwater-Clatsop Lower Chinookan
- n-čə́č ‘my grandmother’ in Lower Chehalis Salish
However, St Onge didn’t work in the far lower Columbia River area where those two languages are traditionally spoken. He was farther upstream, where folks’ tribal language was Ichishkíin and other varieties of Sahaptin. Interestingly, in that language, ‘my grandmother’ has a similar prefix: na-káɬas.
But none of those three words closely resembles < nits >.
So I think I’m going to stick with the “oops, I wrote that wrong” theory.
