A modest proposal: ínatay for ‘against’, ‘contrary’, etc.
Not my idea. Thanks to Louis-Napoléon St Onge.
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His handwritten dictionary from the late 1800’s, which I’m working on in order to publish it, has:
- < enatai > ‘contrary; across; beyond; over the river; opposite’
- < enatai wawa > ‘contradiction’
That’s ínatay in the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary.
All’s I wanna add’s that St Onge’s emphasis on the CONTRARY idea gets me thinkin’…
inatay can fill a gap in Chinook Jargon’s preposition inventory.
To be more precise, inatay is usually an adverb, which is how a lot of spatial ideas get expressed in Chinuk Wawa.
And because we have so few actual prepositions in CW, we often use an adverb + the all-purpose preposition kopa (Northern spelling) / kʰapa (Southern spelling) to articulate the particular 1-D, 2-D, or 3-D orientation we’re talkin’ about.
This, in other words, is how we translate most English-language prepositions into Jargon.
(When you learn about a sufficient range of the world’s languages, you’ll find that something as simple as a so-called preposition in your language corresponds to a number of very different things in some folks’ languages.)
So, to say you’re “against” a thing N, I reckon you’d emit the phrase inatay kʰapa N (inatai kopa N).
Any which way I look at that, it’s a win. All of the possible literal meanings line up the same way: “on the other side of N”, “across from N”, “opposite N”, “contrary to N”.
Okay, maybe not “beyond N”.
