Some interesting “mamuk k̂ow X” expressions in St Onge’s dictionary
I invite my readers’ thoughts about these.
Image credit: Walmart
All glossed as verbs by St Onge:
- mamuk k̂ow kwotl
‘tighten’ - mamuk k̂ow leklu
‘rivet, to’ - mamuk k̂ow wawa
‘guarantee, to; vow, make a __; swear, to; parole, to’
Mamuk k̂ow (munk-k’aw in Grand Ronde spelling) is ‘to tie, to bind, to fasten’ and so on. (Literally ‘make-tied’.)
But what are kwotl (q’wetɬ ‘tight’), leklu (lekʰlu ‘a nail’), and wawa (‘words; to speak’) here?
If all 3 are noun objects of mamuk k̂ow, I have no further questions — except that I’ve never found kwotl as a noun.
If all 3 are verbs, this raises questions about “serial verbs”, which are not really a feature of Chinook Jargon. (Plus ‘a nail’ as a verb would be news to me.)
Are all 3 a sort of adverbial adjunct to mamuk k̂ow? That would still leave questions.
Was mamuk k̂ow sort of a single prefix-like unit in St Onge’s understanding? That would be odd, since k̂ow has such a narrow, unprefixlike meaning (‘to fasten’) compared with e.g. this language’s chako- ‘Inceptive Aspect’ tanas- ‘Diminutive.’
St Onge does indeed have some other formations of double prefixes (e.g. mamuk-chako-) corresponding to single prefixes (mamuk–) everywhere else in our knowledge of the Jargon. On these grounds we can have a healthy skepticism.
I have thoughts about whether the operative units in St Onge’s mind with all 3 were mamuk- (the Causative prefix),and: kow kwotl, kow leklu, and kow wawa.
That is, perhaps he thought of each of those kow + word units as expressing “manners” of fastening.
The hitch in my understanding of such a thing being this: Chinuk Wawa does express manner, but it uses a preposition, kopa (kʰapa), to introduce the manner noun or perhaps action verb.
And while kopa leklu and kopa wawa (‘with a nail’ and ‘with words / by speaking’) are perfectly good manner expressions, I would still be puzzled by kopa kwotl, because kwotl is a stative verb ‘be tight’. There’s a clash of meaning between actively ‘fastening’ and an attempted manner ‘by being tight’!
So, another reasonable view is, St Onge was adding some entries to his dictionary 10 or 20 years after he last actively used this language, and his feel for it was rusty.
Thoughts?
