Reasons for events (there are no reasons for things)
I teach people that Northern Chinook Jargon expresses purposes that things are oriented towards as VERB+pus… and NOUN+kopa…
So now let’s look the other way, at reasons behind the way things are.
It was hard to find an image to use in this post (image credit: Watchman Nee on Facebook)
A single example of the reason for a verb does the job:
- mimaloos kopa mamook-nawitka
‘die for believing (in)’; ‘die because of believing (in)’
NOT *mimaloos poos mamook-nawitka* (which is grammatical in the Southern dialect, though)
This contrasts with the similar “purpose” construction:
- mimaloos poos…
‘die when…’ & ‘die in order to…’
(In the Northern dialect, poos means any as-yet-unrealized state of things, so it includes ‘when (in the future)…’ and ‘in order to…’)
It seems to me that only verbs can have explicit reasons.
We would never find ourselves trying to express the reason for a noun, would you agree? Would we ever say things like using ‘a computer (that’s a computer) because…’?
I suspect no human language does that. Unlike verbs, nouns get treated as such “time-stable concepts” that they’re viewed as sort of eternal.
Mamook-Nawitka has an active or causative connotation similar to the Ancient Hebrew word it is connected to ‘Emunah’ cf. Amen. Believe has a more passive connotation. Tumtum seems more like a passive connotation ‘believe’ unless it is ‘mamook-tumtum’. tl’ap-tumtum seems more passive…
I see what you’re saying, and it chimes with me. If we put it purely into the terms I’ve been arriving at for Chinook Jargon, mamook-nawitka is an active verb; tumtum is more like a stative verb (psychological event verbs often are), and mamook-tumtum is certainly active.