‘Chamber’ in Lower Chinookan, retro English, and Central Chinook Jargon
The things you learn when you’re researching Chinuk Wawa!
This reared its head during our Joe Peter Group session (Tuesdays @ 7PM Pacific Coast Time):
Chamberpot with Napoleon Bonaparte’s head in it
(image credit: Age of Revolution)
The prompt from research assistant, 17-year-old Jack Marr (reading from Franz Boas’s publication of the “Chinook Texts” told by Charles Q’lti/Cultee): “She shall look after the chamber.”
Joe Peter’s translation response: (some words reflecting ‘she shall look after’) ~ qʰá mayka ɬàtwa-ɬáxani. (Literally, “where you go outside”.)
Beyond the sheer difficulty of retrieving words from the low-quality 1941 audio recording, this phrasing had our heads in a swirl in the Joe Peter Group.
Then someone suggested Joe Peter may have taken “chamber” as the more familiar concept, “chamberpot”.
Just about simultaneously, someone recalled that ɬàtwa-ɬáxani is the typical Pacific NW Indigenous culture phrasing for what modern English calls “going to the bathroom” — that is, pooing & peeing. It’s in your copy of the excellent 2012 dictionary from Grand Ronde.
About then, I checked Wiktionary, which reports that “chamber” is indeed an old-fashioned synonym for “chamberpot”.
And I had a look into Boas’s publication, “Chinook: An Illustrative Sketch”, where page 614 reports a root -wiuš ‘urine of male’ and a word built with it, u-wiuš-matk, translated as…”chamber“! Surely meaning ‘chamberpot’.
(For instance, we also find the suffix -matk on page 615 in i-ka-ɬx̣ə́l-matk for a ‘dish’, where i- marks a Masculine noun & -ɬx̣ə́l is to ‘eat’, so the -matk seems like an suffix signifying a ‘container for’ a thing, as Henry Zenk suggested during our Discord session.)
A known fact about many cultures of the world is that people traditionally save up urine in a container. In the Lower Chinookan context, it was used for hair-combing, as the preserved stories show. (We also find this in the “Clackamas Chinook Texts” published by Melville Jacobs in the 1950s.) So, it all makes sense.
Finally, I also looked at the original Lower Chinook-language text that Q’lti had dictated to Boas, on page 42 of which the word that made Jack Marr ask about ‘her looking after the chamber’ was this same thing, pronounced u-ius-əmat but quite recognizable.
So Joe Peter understood the English word “chamber(pot)” perfectly, and gave quite a good translation of it in Jargon.
Bonus fact:
On this site, I have written not only about Chinookan chamberpots, but also about Chinook ‘n’ chamberpots (‘n’ humour), here ‘n’ here!
Bonus bonus fact:
The other root for ‘urine’ that I see in Lower Chinookan and Clackamas is very nearly identical with the word ɬún ‘3’. I’m trying hard not to make a juvenile “going number 3” joke…
