Suttles, “Musqueam Reference Grammar”, Part 8
Naika wawa masi kopa Paisley pi Mokwst Alex, for reminding me of a great book by a great anthropological linguist!
Typically I’ll rake through a dictionary of a Pacific NW Indigenous language, and report to you here on the patterns of Chinook Jargon to be found there.
Image credit: Vics 66
Wayne Suttles’ “Musqueam Reference Grammar“, however, isn’t a dictionary, and I don’t know of one that’s available to me for this particular variety of what some folks have called a single, wide-ranging “Halkomelem” Salish language.
So instead, I’ll snoop through the aforementioned grammar, and…
I’m going to give you a reaction video. 🤩
Just kidding, what I’m gonna do is write my reactions to everything Wayne said about Chinuk Wawa. He had more experience than any living linguist with the Jargon, for a good stretch of years. (Then he taught Henry Zenk, and wow, look what we’ve learned!)
• Page 506:
The terms cícəł ‘above’ and ƛ̓íƛ̓əp ‘below’ are also used attributively, as in cícəł smé·nt ‘high mountain,’ cícəł siʔém ‘God’ (lit. ‘Lord Above,’ probably in origin a calque of the Chinook Jargon sáx̣ali tayí), and ƛ̓íƛ̓əp hə́y̓qʷ ‘Hell’ (lit. ‘fire below’).
This is an ongoing open question in research on the Pacific Northwest. Did the notion of Creator as a ‘sky chief’ get introduced by non-Indigenous people, or was it here already? I don’t know how we could ever resolve it. At this point I’ll point out some more words seen in the Musqueam Reference Grammar that we know from Northern Chinook Jargon: pípə ‘paper’ and púkʷ ‘book’ (p. 506), ʔáwə ‘hour’ and mə́nəc ‘minute(s)’ (p. 511).
