-s ‘possessive of pronouns’ in Wakashan languages explains a BC Coast regionalism in Chinook Jargon
Okey-doke, I guess I’ve put the whole story into the headline up there!
Tip of the hat to Dr Adam Werle for pointing me to a useful reference book:
Michael Fortescue’s “Comparative Wakashan Dictionary” (2007).
Page 405 of that item, long story short, notes a suffix -s in Wakashan languages that makes the possessive form of a pronoun.
This could help us understand why we’ve heard Chinuk Wawa speakers from the British Columbia Coast area saying stuff like maikas for ‘your/yours’ (when talking to one person) and naikas ‘my/mine’!
Don’t you think?
Oh, a reminder I guess, the normal words in Jargon are just maika & naika, for all functions including subject, object, posessor, what have you.
I need to go back to the audio recordings from the Vancouver Island area (or ask Alex Code) whether it’s Mungo Martin I’m remembering, and who else says these forms.
I’ve written — thanks to Dr Dale McCreery — about Nuxalk people singing a Chinook Jargon song with < nikas au >, < nikas tomtom >, < nikas swet-hat > >, literally ‘my brother’; ‘my heart’; and ‘my sweetheart’.
(At that link, you can find another to click & hear the tune, thanks to Alex.)
And that’s real cool to find, because their Nuxalk first language isn’t in the Wakashan but the Salish family!
Nuxalks, it would seem, learned to say maikas and naikas by spending time in a Wakashan-influenced Chinook-speaking environment, most likely in the long-thriving Victoria waterfront community of multiple Indigenous nations.(*)
And that, my friends, is an illustration of how you wind up with a distinct Coastal sub-dialect of Chinook Jargon’s northern dialect!
Also: I was wondering a linguisty wonder about whether folks use maikas & naikas:
- (A) to modify a following Noun Phrase,
- (B) alone as the head of a Noun Phrase (‘yours = the one(s) that you have’ & ‘mine = the one(s) that I have’), or
- (C) both of those.
Here comes an answer…
Lest you presume that this sub-dialect feature is confined to maikas & naikas, George Coombs Shaw’s 1909 CJ dictionary of the Northern Dialect informs us (on page 18), quoting a Coast-area authority:
“Sometimes
s is added to the personal pronouns in
the possessive case; thus nikas,-mine;
mikas,-yours; yakas,-his, hers, its;
nesikas,-ours; mesikas,-yours; klas-
kas,-theirs. This mode is generally
used only when the pronoun is the last
word in the sentence, thus: Okoke kiu-
atan nikas.” — Eells.
That example sentence from Reverend Myron Eells means ‘This horse is mine.’
Bonus fact 1:
For the sake of being thorough, I searched in Eells’s own published CJ dictionary for this observation, without success.
It must be in his vastly larger manuscript dictionary in the archives, I thought, but when I look thru my copy of that one, I just find yakas ‘his, hers, its’.
Inside the front cover of Coombs’s dictionary he cites his “Chief Authorities” including vaguely a “manuscript” by Myron Eells, D.D.
I imagine that that’s the same giant dictionary manuscript I have access to, but that some explanatory pages were left out of the version I’ve got here.
Good thing I coincidentally was just about to do a road trip to Walla Walla to have a look at Eells’s papers.
Bonus fact 2:
(*) (Although the Nuxalk language itself is well known for having lots of influence from its Wakashan next-door neighbours, there’s no strong reason to think folks would have been talking much Chinuk Wawa to each other back in the homelands.)
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!
And join free Zoom sessions…currently Monday @ 7PM (West Coast)!
Contact me for the Zoom link.
