Many sides to ‘help’…and…did re-creolization at Grand Ronde regularize stress?
I intended to try making this very brief!
Image credit: Helpside
Part 1
Modern Southern Chinuk Wawa (circa 1890-present): yéʔlan ‘to help’.
Closest known Lower Chehalis Salish source form: yəl-áʔ-ən ‘help her/him!’
This is an Imperative form, which isn’t pointed out in the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary of CW. Commands are a typical source of CW verbs from various languages, also including Lower Chinookan and Métis/Canadian French.
I mention Lower Chehalis because it’s the only Salish language in the region that uses a verb root that matches up with the CW form. Contrast Quinault’s jə́l (where “j” = [dʒ], like in English Janet) and Upper Chehalis and Cowlitz’s tál.
If the Lower Chehalis source form wasn’t an imperative, but instead an indicative, we’re somewhat unlucky, because in the known LC data, we’ve only found apparent command forms of the root yəl. Still, we can rightly infer that such a form would sound like *yələ́n*, for ‘(s)he helped her/him’.
In both instances, the Lower Chehalis word has its stress on a later syllable than modern Chinuk Wawa has.
How did the stress seemingly migrate?
Part 2
Going forwards in time between the original Lower Chehalis Salish source and the modern Grand Ronde usage, we find:
Central Chinuk Wawa (circa 1838-1870), here in roughly chronological order from earliest onward:
- Demers – Blanchet – St Onge 1871 < elaHan > (the H represents their “broken h” letter)
- St Onge manuscript dictionary n.d. < elaĥan >
- Lionnet < elaham >
- Gibbs < elann >
Observations, A:
In all 4 forms, the initial written < e > might be understandable as /yə ~ yι ~ i ~ e/.
In the first 2 forms, the < H ~ ĥ > can be confidently seen as /x̣/.
Thus ~ yəláx̣ən.
Such a form demands an analysis as a perfective verb yəl-áx̣-ən-Ø, something like ‘help-side-her/him/them-she/he/they’; in actual English, perhaps ‘he helped at her side’.
Observations, B:
In Lionnet, the < h > might be either /x̣/ or /ʔ/.
Lionnet’s < m > may be accurate, or it may be an < n ~ nn > that’s gotten mis-transcribed by the later folks who published his list.
Gibbs’s < nn > also may be a mis-writing of < m >, or (along with Lionnet’s possible < n ~ nn>) it might be approximately /ʔn/. (It’s very common among early non-Indigenous recorders of Lower Chehalis words that they heard glottalized resonants as being more or less “stop”-like, e.g. /n̓ ~ ʔn ~ nʔ/, and wrote them as “nn”, “nt”, “t”, “d” and so on.)
So we have a range of legitimate possible source forms in Lower Chehalis suggested by the above Chinook Jargon documents: ~ yəláx̣ən ~ yəláʔən ~ yəláxəm ~ yəláʔəm. That last one would be in the “Middle Voice”, with a meaning along the lines of ‘(do some) help(ing)!; be helpful!’
Absolutely nothing in these 4 written forms persuades me that the stress had yet shifted to the first syllable by the time these CJ documenters heard and used the word.
Conclusion:
It’s likely that something happened at Grand Ronde reservation, i.e. after 1855, outside of the community of Lower Chehalis speakers, that switched the stress on this word onto the first syllable — which is where stress sits in ~90% of Chinuk Wawa words.
I suspect that folks in that community, who we know were talking Jargon quite a lot and in so doing were re-creolizing it, regularized its stress to put it in line with the highly predictable pattern of CW.
We find lots of other words at Grand Ronde having a first-syllable stress variant that diverges from our expectations, for example numerous multisyllable Métis/Canadian French words, which we default to expecting to have had word-final stress. Instances of this include, with the known variant stress locations marked:
- láhásh ‘axe, hatchet’
- lákamás ‘camas’ (neat example because ‘camas’ comes from Nez Perce, not French, and in PNW English it’s stressed on a different syllable, [′kæməs])
- láplásh ‘board’
- láwén ‘oats’
- líbló ‘sorrel colored, brown’
- tútúsh ‘to nurse, to suck; breast, nipple’
Not all French-sourced Chinuk Wawa words gained this initial-syllable stress variant at Grand Ronde.
But I’m sensing a prosodic regularization — an increased uniformity of stress location — in the re-creolized Chinook Jargon of that historically important community.
