t̓ilímuksh is a foreign pronunciation
The Southern Dialect Chinuk Wawa word for ‘Tillamook’ people is t̓ilímuksh, which is not those Salish people’s own word for themselves (Hutyéyu as I recall).
Homeland defense: the Tillamook Guerrillas in 1942, when my dad lived in nearby Astoria
(image credit: The Oregon History Project)
This I already knew about. The etymology of the word is in Lower Chinookan, where it means ‘the people of Nehalem‘.
But today it struck me that t̓ilímuksh seems also to be foreign to the Lower Chinookan language, in a sense.
The Lower Chinookan original is t-qilím-ukš, varying with t-ʔilím-ukš because /q/ is very often pronounced as glottal stop /ʔ/ in that language.
The resulting sequence of /tʔ/ is not the same thing as ejective /t’/. Speakers of Lower Chinookan carefully distinguished the two.
This is why I take the Grand Ronde CW pronunciation, t̓ilímuksh, as being foreign. It seems like a way non-Chinookan Indigenous people, familiar with other Native languages, might reinterpret how to say it.
Dave, I think that that tʼ is explainable as a conflation (what’s the linguistic term?) of the Lower Chinook nominal plural marker t- with ʔ of the following stem. Leaving aside the origin of the stem-form qilim/ʔilim (q > ʔ before a stressed syllable in Lower Chinook), it seems to me that t-ʔílim-ukš is OK Chinookan (-ukš animate plural).