Syntactic considerations in editing L-N St Onge’s handwritten dictionary
A whole lot of the time, Louis-Napoléon St Onge gave Chinuk Wawa words translations as nouns in English, even when they aren’t nouns in the Jargon.
Thus, when he translates mash-mimlust-tanas (his spelling) as ‘miscarriage’, we pause a moment, we consider that the Chinook Jargon words in that syntactic order are saying something like ’emit-dead-child’, and because the mash is a verb, we see that it would be more accurate to translate the expression as ‘miscarry’.
Image credit: Harmless Drudgery
But in entries that have related meanings to this, St Onge gives us mokst-kopa-iĥt-mash as ‘twins’, and tlun-kopa-iĥt-mash as ‘triplets’. In that syntactic order, the words are saying ‘two-in-one-emission’ and ‘three-in-one-emission’, so we realize that here, mash is a noun. The kopa iĥt placed before it is a dead giveaway.
When I encounter evidence like this, which seems very clear due to the different syntactic frames that a given word, e.g. mash, is being used in, I go ahead and create two separate entries in the edited dictionary — a verb, and a noun.
