Is patl (pʰáɬ) ever used attributively?
Patl “full (of)” is almost always immediately followed by a Noun telling what something (or someone) is full of.
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There are lots of patl… expressions in St Onge’s manuscript dictionary.
The huge majority make total sense to me, because I can understand them as saying “full of NOUN”.
I take them as Adjectival Relative Clauses; in Chinook Jargon speech, you’d put them after the thing (or person) that’s “full of” something. Being clauses, they have a Verb in them, in this case being patl “to be full (of)” — in true Jargon style. (A predicative adjective = a stative verb.)
Now, a few of St Onge’s patl… expressions don’t work for me, even though you might use them as Adjectival Relative Clauses:
My understanding of Chinuk Wawa is such that “patl wek-tik̂eĥ” is impossible to say. “Wek-tik̂eĥ” is only a Verb (“dislike; hate”, never a Noun. St Onge wants this expression to mean “heinous”, and that just doesn’t work for me.
Another reason why a couple of St O’s patl… phrases fail for me is that they try to use patl as an attributive adjective, to be placed immediately before the noun it’s describing:
So his patl-tsok elehi for “swamp” doesn’t succeed, it literally means “wet ground”. I’m very unaccustomed to seeing patl before a noun, and I think the reason for that is easy to spot — I already said it. Patl followed by a noun = “full of” that noun!
But, at this juncture, let me share a couple of expressions that lean into my main question: patl spun “spoonful” and patl lema “handful; armful”. Even though I’m not used to hearing patl Noun (to mean “a full Noun”) phrases, these 2 instinctively work for me! That’s because all that they’re trying to mean is “a full spoon” and “a full hand/arm”.
My questions to my readers are:
Do patl spun & patl lema work for you?
The above examples are all from the older, Central, Dialect. From the Southern Dialect, the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary gives 3 exceptional expressions like the last-quoted bunch, where ‘full’ is used as a modifier of the following noun, i.e. attributively:
- pʰaɬ-kənim ‘full canoe; a canoe full of’
- pʰaɬ-k’wətʰin ‘full belly; pregnant’
- pʰaɬ-lisak ‘full bag; pregnant’
Can you supply any other real examples of this apparently rare structure, patl Noun = “a full Noun”?
