Blows and swells
The Grand Ronde Tribes 2012 dictionary tells us of a word worth knowing:
p’úx̣ən ‘to blow (breath or wind)’.
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A few notes need to be made, though.
GR 2012 rightly gives an etymology in “local Salishan” (SW Washington Salish a.k.a. the Tsamosan languages), púxʷ-n. All 4 of those languages appear to have that root √púxʷ, although I don’t think we know that they all have the inflected form that’s shown. We’ve only found it in, specifically, Upper & Lower Chehalis.
I would add that the mutation from original Salish plain /p/ to Southern Chinook Jargon ejective /p’/ is typical of the unrelated Chinookan languages (scarcely of Salish, except inasmuch as Tsamosan shows a bit of influence therefrom). Chinookan speakers’ influence on the many Lower Chehalis forms in Chinuk Wawa is pervasive.
I’ll blithely skim over the “manner” development of an original rounded (labialized) Salish /xʷ/ into an unrounded Chinook Jargon /x̣/. 😁
But, the “place” alternation between original velar /xʷ/ and CJ /x̣/ is worthy of note! Fairly free alternation back & forth between these 2 places in the mouth is super typical of SW WA Salish. I’ve noted this any number of times here, though it hasn’t emerged in the published linguistics literature. At a minimum, this phonetic detail helps establish that it’s no other Salish source than Tsamosan that’s the etymology.
However, the GR 2012 translation of the CW form is as “transitive…’blow’ “. That, then, is to ‘blow on’, which is borne out by that dictionary’s example sentences & should therefore become the definition provided.
And calling that Salish source form “transitive” is true only of the Perfective Aspect form in those languages. The identical púxʷ-n can also be the intransitive Imperfective Aspect of the same root — which, then, is ‘to blow, be blowing (as wind)’. I believe that that separate sense also exists in Chinuk Wawa, and if so, it should be listed separately from ‘blow on’.
And in fact the other sense shown in GR 2012, for the “variant” but less phonologically mutated:
pʰúxwən, needs to be extracted and made an entirely separate head word meaning ‘swollen’.
This sense matches SW WA Salish; in Lower Chehalis Salish for example, txʷ-púxʷ = ‘swell up’, more literally ‘become swollen’ (or ‘become blown[-up]’). In that language, one and the same root functions for both ‘blowing’ and ‘swelling’, depending on whether or not you put transitive morphology onto it.
Interestingly, Grand Ronde’s pʰúxwən ‘swollen’ — which my research indicates wasn’t previously documented — has more or less taken over the role of an earlier-known word. Louis-Napoléon St Onge’s manuscript dictionary of Chinook Jargon (Central Dialect) has a number of occurrences of the root word:
< powilĥ > ‘swollen’
I want to bet you a dollar that that’s from the same Salish root, and the same languages. It’s identifiable as *púxʷ-ɬ*, ‘(in a state of being) swollen’ — although I haven’t found that exact inflected form in the known available data! But Upper Chehalis and Cowlitz both have a very similar root for ‘swollen’, of which I find a Cowlitz form pús-ɬ ‘swell up’. Quinault uses a totally different root. On this evidence (see the above txʷ-púxʷ), Lower Chehalis once again looks like the most likely source of a Columbia River-region Chinook Jargon word.
Or 3 CJ words!
