“If it weren’t for…”: the clearest counterfactuals
Humans have the ability to imagine alternatives to how things actually occur.
But that’s not to say it’s the easiest thing our minds do.
A link to “Bad Liquor” by American Music Club,
who would’ve sung too much about booze
if they hadn’t had a hard time staying together
(image credit: Spotify)
Look:
< 25 > man pi < 30 > kluchmin klaska haha milalam
‘There were 25 men and 30 women who made confession,’pi < 28 > kluchmin pi mokst man iskom ⊕ {likalisti} kopa
‘and 28 women and two men that took communion at’[NNNN]: pus ilo ukuk wiski ayu wiht man
‘[village]; if it weren’t for that alcohol, plenty more men’iskom ⊕.
‘could have taken communion.’
— from Kamloops Wawa #201 (June 1902), page 137
Negative counterfactuals
I want to suggest that this negative setup is an easier kind of “woulda coulda shoulda” formation to spot & understand in Chinuk Wawa than some others.
I feel that having the 2 words pus ilo (poos heilo in Teach Yourself Northern CJ; pus wik in Southern dialect) is a big help:
Saying ‘if not’ is probably going to mean ‘if it hadn’t been’ or else the related concept, ‘unless’.
But there are other varieties of this imagining of alternative realities that we do with the help of language.
Positive counterfactuals
Positive setups can be way harder to catch, can’t they?
Imagine an even less reality-based setup — if you said the positive version of the above, Pus mitlait ukuk wiski… it could sound like ‘When there’s booze’.
(Especially in the Northern Dialect, which doesn’t even have separate words for ‘when’ and ‘if’. They’re both pus.)
And that wouldn’t have sounded very counterfactual at all!
English
Some of the problem in “hearing” the contrary-to-fact assertions in Chinook Jargon is in listening with English-language ears.
I myself, who grew up talking English, can sometimes tend to translate a statement like the above clipping as a kind of halfways successful ‘could take…’
…as if {see my counterfactual right here? 🙌} it only referred to a future possible outcome, rather than one in past times.
Typology
Drawing from my training in linguistic typology, I believe counterfactuals in the average language are very often
(A) unusually complex,
(B) infrequently used,
(C) recently added to the language, or
(D) two or more of the above.
And if so, this would help explain why they’re one of the harder things to learn.
Don’t take my word for it, I’ve only studied about 50 languages.
What could your experience have been?
Conditionals
Finally, let’s point out there is no dedicated “conditional” or “subjunctive” form of the verb in Chinuk Wawa.*
‘Take(s)/took’, ‘would take’, ‘can/could take’, etc. are all identical in this language: iskom.
So in CW, you rely on the context of that main-clause verb, the pus… or pus ilo… “setup” (which, helpfully, is almost always said before the main clause!), to determine the intended modal sense of the ‘taking’.
* A linguisty thing to say:
Instead of a dedicated modal inflection of the verb itself, the Jargon uses an irrealis subordinating conjunction, which scopes over everything to its right, including the main clause.
That positioning helps you to see the difference in possible senses between (indigo for irrealis here):
Pus ilo ukuk wiski, klaska iskom…
(‘If there weren’t that booze, they’d (have) take(n)…’)
and, with main clause first,
Klaska iskom…, pus ilo ukuk wiski
(normally ‘They take/will take…, if there’s none of that booze’.)
Syntactic constituent order matters in interesting ways in comparatively isolating languages like this one and many hundreds of others.
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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