tənəs-COLOR: inspired by Salish?
I’m not intending this to be the last word on the matter. I’ll be delighted if a Linguistics major steals this idea and does up a whole study on it!
Image credit: Amazon
Louis-Napoléon St Onge has a tanas COLOR pattern in his Central Dialect (oldest dialect) color-variant names:
- tanas pil (‘a little red’ = pink),
- tanas tlel (‘a little black/dark’ = brown),
- tanas tkop (‘a little white’ = grayish)…
Those last 2 already show up in the Demers-Blanchet-St Onge dictionary/catechism/prayer/hymn book of 1871 that’s based on circa 1838 Fort Vancouver-area data.
(Quick note: his sitkom [‘half’] COLOR expressions are more literal, denoting mixed colors or mixed racial ancestry.)
I have an idea.
Let me show you how the four SW Washington Salish languages also use ‘littleness’ to express being or becoming ‘sorta COLOR X’:
Cowlitz Salish:
- ‘brown’ kʷác ʔaks-nə́q ‘a.little colored-black’
- also, ‘to turn COLOR X’ expressions are DIMINUTIVE+ intransitive morphology:
- ʔac-{COLOR-DIMINUTIVE}-m̓ɬ for ‘whiten’;
- {COLOR-DIMINUTIVE}-m̓ɬ for ‘turn pale’;
- {COLOR-DIMINUTIVE}-m for ‘blacken’
Upper Chehalis Salish:
-
- ‘yellowish‘ ʔac-{COLOR-DIMINUTIVE}-mɬ
- ‘to turn COLOR X’ is {COLOR-DIMINUTIVE} + intransitive as in Cowlitz, found for ‘whiten’, ‘redden’, ‘make blue’
- another way to express ‘COLOR-ish‘ is with “slow” reduplication -VC, found for ‘bluish’
Quinault Salish: the available data are somewhat hard to work with, but ‘purple’ looks like xʷas COLOR-colored, where xʷas would be cognate with the above kʷác ‘a.little’.
Lower Chehalis Salish: no clear indications of words for ‘COLOR-ish’, etc.
I make the comparison with these Salish languages because Chinook Jargon has Salish as one of its 4 main parent languages.
Now, specifically, it’s Lower Chehalis Salish that usually emerges as the big contributor among these 4, having been a co-language of the Lower Chinookan people on whose territory the Jargon took shape.
(Chinook village seems to be the birthplace of the original pidgin Chinuk Wawa, 1794+; Fort Astoria the 1st setting of the Métis creolization thereof, 1810+; both being in Lower Chinookan land.)
So, it’s a little unexpected that we don’t easily find indications of DIMINUTIVE COLOR terms in Lower Chehalis! It looks like that language may be patterning with Quinault in a coastal sub-unit of SW WA Salish, as it often does, in this case possibly lacking the pattern we’re seeking.
Contrasting with this, as we often find, is an inland sub-unit, of both Upper Chehalis and Cowlitz, both showing a clear DIMINUTIVE COLOR pattern. The latter language in particular sometimes shows up as the most likely candidate source for early Chinuk Wawa forms.
And Cowlitz territory includes the location of Fort Vancouver…which was the 2nd setting of the new Métis community that made Chinuk Wawa its (creole) language, 1825+.
I suspect, then, that tanas COLOR terminology in the Jargon dates to Fort Vancouver times, and is yet another element of the often overlooked Salish influence on the language.
We need to check other languages in the vicinity to see if they could have contributed this DIMINUTIVE COLOR formation to the Jargon:
Other parents of Chinook Jargon:
Indo-European: neither English nor (Métis/Canadian) French call certain color shades ‘little’ COLOR.
Nor in the 4 Chinookan languages. (Some scant terms translated as ‘yellowish’, ‘greenish’, and ‘reddish’ don’t carry any Diminutive morphology I recognize.)
Other regional languages:
I find no indications of diminutivity for any colors in Quileute (Chimakuan family).
K’alapuyan languages instead form ‘light COLOR’ with the word for ‘dull/flat’+COLOR.
So, unless tanas COLOR is a purely Chinuk Wawa-internal invention — a real possibility! — the explanation that offers the greatest amount of overt evidence seems to me to be Salish influence.
