Expanding our minds about “snas” (‘rain’)!
Thanks to a conversation the other day with Doctors Henry Kammler and ƛukša Adam Werle, we have this thought.
My attention went to early contact times, when Nuuchahnulth and/or its pidginized form Nootka Jargon got written down by largely uncomprehending newcomers.
Another time someone mis-heard “sky” (image credit: Yarn)
I particularly got thinking about examples like these:
- < peeshackisnass > ‘Foul weather’, from Robert Haswell
- < klwahmess Naas > ‘the Sovereign of the Sky, God Almighty’, from James Strange, and its variant form:
< Kleewakmees nas > ‘Another name of Enekeetseem’ (the wolf ritual mask) i.e. ɬiwaḥmis ‘clouds’ and n’a•s ‘day’, from Alexander Walker
Both phrases involve Nuuchanulth’s word n̓a•s meaning ‘day; daylight’, etc.
Maybe it’s because of that word having been heard by Euro-Americans in Nuuchahnulth expressions like the above, where the word before n̓a•s happened to end in [s], that some maritime traders would have taken the locals as talking about “the snass“!
Perhaps to be compared here, because they also precede the “nass” part with voiceless fricatives that Europeans could have heard as being approximately [s], are:
- < Cloopahish nass > ‘It’s a fine warm day’, from Haswell
- < eenaeehl nas > ‘sky’, from James Cook
Don’t let me give you a mistaken impression here: those long-ago journal keepers almost always write the equivalent of n’a•s as a separate word beginning with “n”, and they also have it as a word in isolation, e.g. Mociño’s < naz > ~ < nas > ‘heaven’.
And yet I have quite an easy time imagining that the majority of the men (they were nearly 100% male) aboard the Euro-American ships who weren’t writing down the local lingo (most of them were illiterate) might have perceived and uttered snas.
That is, they may have taken utterances like those quoted above as being Adjective + Noun. The noun being *snas.
Fun fact — in natively spoken Nuučaan̓uɬ, there aren’t necessarily adjectives in those utterances! We’d be talking about verbs in many or most cases.
It’s mariners on Euro-American ships who are almost certainly the folks responsible for snas becoming used to express ‘rain’, once they brought Nootka Jargon to the Columbia River, where it was an entirely foreign language to the Lower Chinookan and Lower Chehalis people.
The “White”, “English-speaking” (they weren’t all either of those things, but that was the shipboard culture) sailors did, in the interest of navigation and so on, try to discuss the weather with locally knowledgeable people.
They probably gestured at the sky, commenting and asking about the snas, and could have been understood as wanting to know when ‘rain’ would impede their ships’ movements.
Well,
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?
Hey! Teach Yourself northern-dialect Chinook Jargon!
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