Are pants ‘male’?
[Editing to say something I’d meant to include, that I don’t find (the) words for ‘leggings / trousers / pants / pantaloons / breeches / britches’ in any Chinookan language besides Kathlamet. “Wishram Texts” mentions them but only in English translation.]
Is there any real connection going on here, I wonder? Or just a chance resemblance?
Chinook Jargon sik’áluks ‘pants, trousers’ is said to have its etymology in Chinookan.
Gendered much? (Image credit: Chinook.cc)
There is indeed a Kathlamet-language stem is identified in the fine 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary: t-iá-sak̓aluks ‘his leggings’, t-sak̓áluks ‘leggings’.
But: both of those words occur just once each, in just one story in our main Kathlamet data source, the “Kathlamet Texts” that those links take you to.
The rest of the time in Kathlamet, the word used for ‘leggings’ is different: t-qiɬát̓awəlxtix ~ t-x̣iɬát̓awəlxtix.
Why the difference?
Hard telling, as both words occur in the same genre (myth texts), and we don’t seem to know any words for ‘leggings’ in any of the 3 other Chinookan languages!
Could it have been one of the many cases where we find the overworked fluent speaker, Q’ltí (Charles Cultee), momentarily lapsing into Chinuk Wawa? (That’s to ask, might he have taken the CW word & added on the Kathlamet neuter-gender singular prefix t-?)
In any event, I happened to notice a similar-shaped word in all 4 members of the family:
- Lower Chinookan t-kála-uks ‘males’; í-kala ‘a male, a man’,
- Kathlamet i-kál-ukš (in the phrase i-kál-ukš i-múlək-əmax̣ ‘male (elks)’); í-kala ‘a male’
- Clackamas í-kala ‘a male child’
- Kiksht i-kala ‘a male (child)’
So I’m curious whether the one ‘leggings’ word in Kathlamet was specifically male-referencing?
And I wonder if the same word may have existed in other Chinookan languages as well. We would kind of expect it to have actually come from Lower Chinookan, downstream in the territory where Chinuk Wawa pretty same into being.
Sik̓áluks sure looks like it should have originally been a dual-number noun in Chinookan: s- is the dual prefix.
And it would make plenty of sense for a word meaning ‘leggings / trousers / pantaloons / pants / breeches’ to have been dual, yeah? Think about English — “a pair of pants”.
Very interesting proposal! I don’t think the lower river people had pants (trousers) as an indigenous article of clothing, did they? Something they may have first encountered on the persons of visiting sailors manning (they were all men) the crews of trading ships? Note that there is a token also from Curtis’s Kathlamet word list, so Cultee wasn’t the only source. I don’t think we had yet accessed the drafts of the Curtis vols at the LA County Museum of Natural History (thanks to George Lang for sharing those with us), so we didn’t yet know the source of Curtis’s word-lists when I compiled the dictionary. His (that is, his team linguist W. E. Myers’s) Kathlamet source was Sam Millett (Emma Luscier’s father).
naika wawa masi, henri. I’m with you, I want to know whether the Lower Chinookans / Clatsops wore leggings. Upper Chinookans as well.
deiv