chako-[Ideophone.of.characteristic.sound] ?
Here’s a sketch of a concept of an idea…
On a certain level, I just need to read more of “the literature” in linguistics about ideophones. (Neat link to Ideophone.org, “The Ideophone”, there!)
I offer the following hypothesis for any Linguistics student to write their own study on.
Subcategorizing the words of Chinuk Wawa that are sourced from Chinookan-language ideophones:
(Using Louis-Napoleon St Onge’s manuscript data.)
We do find Inceptive Aspect constructions involving chako- plus the ex-ideophones.
But.
I’ve never found this chako- combined with an ideophone of characteristic sound in the Jargon, that is to try saying chako-teĥteĥ to generate a meaning like *”start to teĥteĥ“* (‘trot’), etc.
It would seem that the characteristic sound of a thing has no logical beginning, nor, I imagine, an ending.
Ideophones that don’t solely denote a characteristic sound, however, can be inflected that way: chako-ala ‘be astonished’, that is, ‘get all “Alá!”, analogous to English ‘be all “Whoa!” ‘) Y’see, alá is nobody’s characteristic sound, even though we’re all tired of Scott 😛
Could this be, like so many traits of Chinook Jargon words, inherited from Chinookan? Or might it be a Jargon-internal grammatical restriction? And other such questions.
This is about the Central Dialect, let me specify. The similar Southern Dialect might differ in this regard, or not. The Northern Dialect simply doesn’t retain much of an ideophone presence.
Just parking this here in public for now with a FREE, RUNS GREAT sign on it 😁
