Mid-Columbia pidgin sub-dialect of Central dialect of Chinook Jargon: Part 2 ‘shikstewa’
I’m going to repeat an old observation here, just so it gets filed with the rest of the Yakama Chinuk Wawa stuff.
#2: shikstewa
Image credit: Canet Boat Plaisance
I previously wrote…
Those of my readers who have a fair acquaintance with the Jargon should recognize the similarity with shiksh ‘friend’.
My understanding has been that < sixtiwah > is just another form of that word, used in Cayuse and Sahaptin country.
Father St. Onge’s 1892 manuscript dictionary of the Jargon has < shikstewa > ‘associate; friend’. Although he doesnʹt specify this as one of his “Yakima jargon” words, almost the only other knowledge we have of this term is from the present-day dictionary of Yakama Sahaptin (glossed as ʹgroup of friendsʹ), and Father Pandosy’s 1862 grammar/dictionary of Yakama (one of his roots glossed as ʹfriendʹ).
(In related Umatilla Sahaptin, the recent dictionary has síks ‘friend, pal’ and twá ‘be together’ as a bound root following others in compounds. But it doesn’t show anything like *sikstwa, nor does either Sahaptin dictionary have any word for nest resembling *siks.)
Anyway, given her background, I had to ponder whether young Eliza got < sixtiwah > from some sort of specifically Nez Perce-influenced Chinuk Wawa. Several known words of early Chinook Jargon already have been agreed as having NP sources — ‘camas’ being a biggie.
Among the most probable sources of this ‘friend’ word that I’ve turned up is indeed the Nez Perce language (another Sahaptian language, related to the above-mentioned). Haruo Aoki’s dictionary shows tiwé• forming derived nouns meaning ‘friend, -mate, co-…-er’. A specific sub-entry under this root (as he analyzes its syntactic class) is sí•kstiwa• ‘(1) darling, (2) genitals’ with a cross-reference to sí•ks ‘nest’. So the word perhaps literally means ‘nest-mate’!
And it seems possible to me that the Jargon’s shiksh is in fact a “clipped form” from an earlier < sixtiwah >, a process that I’d think must’ve happened within Jargon, as I find no evidence that Nez Perce speakers would call a friend literally ‘nest’!
The root for ‘friend’ in Lower Chinookan is just -shiksh. Interestingly, Upper Chinookan, spoken nearer to Sahaptin, has a totally different root for it. This raises the question of whether that noun, like many other morphemes in LC, was borrowed directly from Sahaptin, or else (since it’s the short form) from the Jargon instead.
All of these are new ideas regarding the history of Chinuk Wawa, thanks to some old documents quoted by Debra Gwartney.
My one new thought is, the Sahaptian-family ~ tiwa, in its form and meaning, has a striking resemblance to the suffix in Salish languages that gets used as a Reciprocal (“each other”) marker, or as an Obviative (“the other one”) marker!
