St Onge’s kopet tai ‘abdicate’: stative-verb implications for kopet- in Central Dialect
Two lonesome forms in Louis-Napoleon St Onge’s handwritten dictionary, which I found in an archive back East several years ago, suggest the interesting possibility of a uniquely Central Dialect feature.
Image credit: The Global Yeshiva
They are these:
- < kopet elaitiĥ >
literally “stop being.a.slave”
which St. O. defines as “emancipation” - < kopet tai >
“stop being.a.chief”
“abdicate”
These are the only examples I find of terminative-aspect (cessative) < kʰəpit-> followed by a predicate that’s not an Active Verb. “Be a chief” and “be a slave” are Stative Verbs.
My sense of < kopet > “stop” in Chinook Jargon is that it’s taken to be an intentional act — therefore an active verb.
And, just like the other CJ words that grammaticalized into affixy stuff, its eventual development into < kopet-> held onto elements of its original meaning.
Due to this, any valid < kopet- > formation must be an Active Verb.
So any attempt at fusing < kopet- > with a Stative Verb would be a syntactic clash. Ungrammatical.
We can hope for more data to appear — it’s possible — to prove whether < kopet- > plus a Stative Verb is a genuinely productive pattern, unique to the Central Dialect.
Alternatively, it may be just St Onge getting creative with the language, as he was known to do (a clue may be that these 2 expressions are related to each other semantically)…
…And violating its rules a bit in the process!
These questions bring to mind the minor puzzle of munk-míɬet-miɬət, one Grand Ronde elder’s formation for “to arrange, place multiple objects”, mentioned in Henry Zenk’s comment to a post here the other day.
I pointed out that Southern Chinuk Wawa’s productive root-reduplication seems limited to active verbs; Henry then shared this one stative-verb reduplication.
One guess I have about munk-míɬet-miɬət is that the munk- (i.e. mamook-) prefix, creating an active verb, allows a following root to reduplicate even if it’s not an active root.
* Bonus fact:
Probably the best-known < kopet- > form is this Central and Southern Dialect idiom:
- < kopet komtoks >
“finish remembering”
“forget”
…which we don’t find in the Northern Dialect, where instead we say mash-kumtuks, literally “leave.off.of remembering“.*
There have been still other synonyms for “forget” in Chinuk Wawa:
< mahlie > from Lushootseed, and másh tə́mtəm (literally “leave the thought”)
The multiplicity of expressions for this concept, according to the thinking of historical linguists, is suggestive of the recent vintage of at least some of them.
At least < mahlie > and mash-kumtuks are Northern, which is indeed younger than the Central Dialect.
As the language was brought north from the Columbia River, did < kopet komtoks > stop sounding sensible?
Did < kopet komtoks > stop seeming like (←see what I did there) the Active Verb “stop paying attention to” (because “pay attention to” is an older meaning of < komtoks >), and more like a non-volitional, therefore Stative Verb, “stop being aware of; stop knowing”?
