“kanewe iĥta” throughout history
There’s something of a through-line in Chinook Jargon, in terms of alternative pronunciations of “everything”.
By “everything”, I mean the corresponding CJ term. All dialects have the pronunciation kanawi-ikta.
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But from the 19th century onwards, we find kanawi-ixta as well.
It’s as if there were a sort of conflation of the element ikta (which means “something; thing; what”) with ixt (which means “one; one thing”).
This came back to my attention last night as our Discord group was working through more of Joe Peter’s audio from about 1941. That Central Dialect speaker had a tendency to say kanawi-ixta.
I’ve also noticed this pronunciation as a less common alternative in the handwritten dictionary of Louis-Napoleon St Onge, who spells it kanewe-iĥta. That’s in the Central Dialect also.
We find pretty clear signs of the same pronunciation sporadically in the Southern and Northern Dialects as well, typically written Settler-style as < ichta >. Click that link to see examples throughout my website.
Similarly, there was a common (especially among Settlers) pronunciation ikt for the normal ixt “one”. In that instance, it’s easy to see that the sound “x” was hard for many non-Indigenous people to say, leading them to use “k” from English.
But in the example of ikta getting said as ixta, the resulting variant is more Indigenous-sounding and less Settler-sounding…
