How to inflect an interjection!
Not something you see every day in most languages…eh?
A fascinating problem has come up in my work on Louis-Napoléon St Onge’s handwritten dictionary of Chinuk Wawa.
Image credit: Thoughtco
This is the circa-1870s manuscript that the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary makes some references to.
Kwish is an interjection.
I knew St Onge had an entry for kwish, as he spells it (sometimes with an exclamation point, and I’ll say more about that).
His definition for that word is ‘pshaw!’, ‘fy!’ (i.e. fie), ‘disdain’ and ‘scorn’. The first 2 reflect the fact that this is an interjection. The second 2 show you what it conveys.
This is all straightforward stuff.
What else is kwish?
But the very next entry in St Onge’s dictionary is kwish-wawa, ‘sarcasm’. One infers that that’s a noun, from the translation he gives, although St Onge’s fondness for big English words often obscured the line between noun and verb…
My point for the moment is: St Onge seems to be claiming that the oldest dialect of Chinook Jargon, what I call the Central Dialect that stayed in the Columbia River homeland of the language, makes compounds out of interjections.
:-O Whoa!
I have a hard time coming up with any language that can do that. This kwish-wawa would be like if English could refer to *pshaw-talk*, or to someone *pshaw-talking*. Don’t take it from me, I’m just a guy who grew up knowing only English…so ask yourself, does that sound like real English? It doesn’t to me.
For me talking English real good, I can’t just attach words directly onto interjections such as hey!, whoa!, shucks!
It gets much weirder.
St Onge also gives us an entry for:
- mamuk-kwish ‘spurn; scorn; reject with scorn’
You can easily sense that mamuk-kwish is a verb, even if you’re limited to looking at the translations shown. Plus, it’s built with the Active/Causative prefix mamuk-, which by definition produces a verbal word.
:-O Whoa! :-O Whoa!
Apparently Central Chinook Jargon can inflect interjections!
In English, this would be like being able to say *I hah’ed them*, building on the triumphant exclamation hah! In my English, that’s marginally acceptable at best. I don’t believe any old exclamation can freely get inflected in my language.
And let’s remember that quite a lot of interjections are far from being canonical words in the first place. Think of the sounds represented by English tsk and humph! (Or of West African-style “suck-teeth”.)
And…?
How about the further development of the above verb:
- komtoks-mamuk-kwish ‘disdainful; scornful’
Well, komtoks- is in fact a productive Central Chinuk Wawa prefix that results in propositions of habituality and predisposition.
Which in the Jargon are verbs.
:-O Whoa! :-O Whoa! :-O Whoa!
The Central Dialect can really, really inflect an interjection.
All of this, however rare it is among human languages, is a truly unusual and unexpected thing to find.
Nice find! Possibly this is an areal feature.
In Nuu-chah-nulth (NCN) inflection is marginally possible with a few interjections / particles, namely čuu (“done”, “bye”, “well …” [turn-taking utterance], “OK”), čukʷaa (“c’mon”, “come here”), kaaʔa (“hand it over!”), maa (“here you are”). Here are full verbs derived from two of them:
čuuʔap (-’ap = CAUS) “let it be enough (i.e. make it be čuu)”
čuuʔap̓i “come to an end! don’t be long-winded”
čuuʔap̓aƛ̓ičas “y’all let me come to an end now, let me wrap it up” etc.
čučuukʷaʕin “inviting (lit. making the sound of čukʷaa)”
čučuukʷaʕinmas “distributing invitations from door to door (lit. walking through the village making the sound of čukʷaa)”.
Though the particles/interjections čuu, čukʷaa, kaaʔa, maa are not verbs, they take on a few inflectional clitics for plural, tense, directionals and subject-object marking in the imperative: čukʷaaʔaƛ̓ik “come (sg.) here now” (both čukʷaa and -’ik indicate imperative + “come”, … redundant but emphatic), meeʔik “come to get it” (lit. “come here for [the utterance] maa“).
In “historic” NCN (E.Sapir & A.Thomas corpus, collected 1910–1933, speakers born c. 1850s) there is an example for the inflection of a “pure” interjection (i.e. not a particle) ʔaaʔaa, indicating pain:
ʔaaʔaaʔaƛḥačka “by the sound of it: are you hurting?” (lit. “are you ʔaaʔaa at the moment?”, using a quotative-interrogative) as an elaborated way of saying “I’m sorry for you”.
Čuuʔap̓aƛ̓is! 😉
Henry K.
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Henry naika tiliHum, this is wonderful stuff and I’m thankful you’ve shared it with us. I hadn’t thought of this until you mentioned it: — Chinook Jargon perhaps preserves traces of some of these Nuučaan̓uɬ inflected interjections, in (at least one version of) our [click the words for links] cháku ‘come’, nánich, and … possibly more. In fact I myself have referred to these parallels in past posts on this website, but forgot about that 😂
I’m so glad that the circle of people contributing to this blog includes experts in as complex a subject as Wakashan languages! Naika wawa masi!
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