Hold on tight! Here’s an earlier Lower Chinookan etymology for t’úʔan
ɬúsh-nánich (tloosh-nanich)!
Hmm, that expression for ‘take care of’ / ‘be careful’ / ‘look out!’ might have deep Indigenous roots.
My eye was caught by something in the old Lower Chinookan language (Clatsop-Shoalwater as I sometimes call it), where Franz Boas spoke of:
…the compounds with t!o WELL
ē-t!o’-cg-am hold him well! 44.15 (-t!o- well; -cg to take, hold; -am completion)
— “Chinook: An Illustrative Sketch”, Boas 1910:593
He doesn’t give any other examples of this type of compound, unfortunately, but keep reading to the end of today’s post.
Let me convert Papa Franz’s way of talking into a form that you should be more familiar with, using the modern Grand Ronde Tribes way of spelling Indigenous sounds — Boas is saying,
- There exist compound words, a very useful thing to know about this parent language of Chinook Jargon;
- Some of the LC compounds involve the root –t̓u- which means ‘well’ (‘good’);
- An example being LC’s verb i-t̓ú-shg-um meaning ‘hold him well!’ which occurs on page 44, line 15, of Q’lti’s “Chinook Texts” (see image below), although when you go check on that, it’s translated as ‘hold it [a whale] fast!’ i.e. firmly, and has an emphatically long first vowel in that storytelling setting;
- And this verbal command is built from the following parts list:
- [i- ‘him’ as direct object],
- -t̓ú ‘well’
- -shg ‘to take, hold’
- -um ‘COMPLETION’
One point in sharing this with you today is this:
We have lots & lots of similar “compound verbs” in current Chinuk Wawa, although the word for ‘well’ that we use is of course ɬúsh. I’ve already mentioned ɬúsh-nánich (tloosh-nanich). Another is ɬúsh-k’áw-k’aw ‘well tied; nicely tied’.
Look through your Chinuk Wawa learning materials and/or the 2012 Grand Ronde dictionary for more like this!
But check this out, too: I suspect the Southern and Central Dialects of the Jargon also have a more direct descendant of the Lower Chinookan ‘well’ compounds. If you’ve learned the language from folks associated with Grand Ronde, you know a word for ‘have; keep’, t’úʔan.
That CW word t’úʔan comes from SW Washington Salish, where it’s analyzable as t’úʔ-n and is used to express ‘put away, store away’ and so on.
We can expect it most likely to have come from the known cognate in Lower Chehalis, which was the direct neighbor of Lower Chinookan. It also shows up in Cowlitz & Upper Chehalis.
The Salish suffix -n means ‘it/her/him’ as a direct object.
The deal is, this root √t’úʔ is not native to Salish as far as we linguists can tell…I checked Aert Kuipers’s “Salish Etymological Dictionary” through and through…so I think it’s borrowed from Lower Chinookan!
In fact I suspect that the glottal stop /ʔ/ at the end of √t’úʔ is a Salish invention. The Chinookan root is definitely a “CV” shape, a consonant and a vowel. But Salish feels a need for “CVC” roots, and in my um imagination 🤩, the default consonant (call it the most vowel-like consonant) to add is /ʔ/.
(Far more information than you wanted: The other way Salish can handle a CV root shape that ends in /u/ like this would be to interpret that sound as a default vowel schwa + an “u”-like consonant: /əw/ or /əw̓/. And voilà, you’d achieve the desired CVC shape! In fact, assuming the /əw̓/ option, you wind up with exactly the same pronunciation as √t’úʔ.)
Bonus fact:
A couple more Chinook Jargon words you might know that are related to that Lower Chinookan i-t̓ú-shg-um ‘hold him well!/hold him fast!’ …
- t’úkti ‘pretty’
(presumably from another Lower Chinookan compound stem, t’ú+kti (‘good’+’thing’)) - ískam ‘hold; pick up; pick out’
(from another Lower Chinookan imperative verb, í-sk-am (him-take-COMPLETIVE) ‘take him/it!’)
𛰅𛱁𛰃𛱂 𛰙𛱁𛱆𛰅𛱁 𛰃𛱄𛰙𛰃𛱄𛰙? qʰáta mayka tə́mtəm?
kata maika tumtum? Qu’en penses-tu?
What do you think?
And can you say it in Chinuk Wawa?
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