A better etymology for tloosh / ɬush / tlus
I put several known spellings of the Chinuk Wawa word for ‘good’ into my headline today, for a reason.
Image credit: No Sweat Shakespeare
Once we engage deeply with the documentary sources about Nuučaan̓uɬ words from just before Chinook Jargon is known to have existed, we become able to tighten up some etymologies.
Everybody agrees that the original CJ way of saying the word for ‘good’ ended, and still ends, in a “sh” sound. That’s why we see lots of old spellings like < klush, kloshe, tloosh > and so on.
And we agree that this word traces back to the Nootka Sound region of Vancouver Island, BC (in Canada), where the Nuučaan̓uɬ language has a root word ƛuɬ ‘good; happy; attractive, good-looking; clean’.
What’s been overlooked by linguists till now is that the early (Nootka Jargon) sources on the pidgin precursor to Chinuk Wawa routinely have spellings like < klew shish > (Jewitt 1967:90) for ‘good’…with an extra syllable…
Which very plainly reflects the Nuučaan̓uɬ 3rd person singular indicative suffix -ʔiš. Therefore, an original stative-verb meaning ‘it (or she or he) is good (etc.)’
Having engaged with the original data, we now have an even simpler and more believable explanation for why the Chinook Jargon descendant of the Nuuchahnulth word ends in a “sh” sound.
Instead of our previous conclusion that amounted to “Ah, English speakers couldn’t say the slurpy /ɬ/ of ƛuɬ, and substituted /š/“, we can now see that a “sh” sound was present all along!
(Note, I’ve also written up an improved etymology for kəmtəks / kumtuks / komtax!)
