A Lower Chehalis etymology for “beads”?
A famously Lower Chinookan word could conceivably trace farther back to neighbouring Lower Chehalis Salish.
I’m not trying to change our ideas of where Chinook Jargon got kʰamusak ‘bead(s)’.
A Lower Chehalis speaker with beads (image credit: powwows.com on Facebook)
But its earlier history may be detectable.
A case can be made that this noun in turn is has an etymology in neighbouring Lower Chehalis Salish, where:
- the “kam” part is of the normal CVC shape for a root (cf. Lower Chehalis √k̓am ‘narrow’),
- -ús is a pan-Salish “lexical suffix” for ‘round item; face’, and
- -aq/-əq is a lexical suffix for ‘head’ etc.
We don’t know of any Lower Chehalis word *k̓amúsəq.
But it’s got the form of a valid word in that language, and its parts would come together to make a sensible meaning.
This is a situation that we often find in Lower Chinookan, alone among the Chinookan family of languages. Quite a number of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other things look Salish.
Huh.
𛰅𛱁𛰃𛱂 𛰙𛱁𛱆𛰅𛱁 𛰃𛱄𛰙𛰃𛱄𛰙?
qʰáta mayka tə́mtəm?
kata maika tumtum?
Que penses-tu?
What do you think?
And can you say it in Chinuk Wawa?
