“kʰíláy” for joy! We’ve found a relative of “kímtəks”!
“Ocian in view! O the joy!” (image credit: US Mint)
The idea that I want to share here comes from a train of thought that includes my previous post,
kímtəks: not such a rarity, and not so new
There, I mentioned a longstanding trait in the lower Columbia River area, where languages can shift a stressed schwa (/ə́/) to an /í/, for rhetorical and pragmatic purposes, such as topicality, “emphasis”, what have you.
The resulting /í/ can often sound like [é] and even a quite open [έ] ~ [ǽ].
That trait is found in the mix of languages that heavily influenced Grand Ronde re-creolized Chinuk Wawa, the variety I call the Southern Dialect. Southwest Washington Salish (“Tsamosan”) languages do this; some of them regularly form Diminutives in this way. Members of the Chinookan family have this sound shift, too.
Anyhow, it occurs to me that still another Southern Chinuk Wawa word might have partaken of what we’re talking about.
It’s the distinctly Grand Ronde pronunciation of ‘cry’, kʰíláy. That’s one of the variants of kʰláy ~ kʰəláy ‘to cry’ (as in weeping, shedding tears).
Obviously this is a word sourced from English. Now, in English as I grew up talking it, we normally pronounce ‘cry’ as kráy.
Now in what I experience as a recent innovation, some English-speakers are capable of inserting a schwa into an initial consonant cluster such as we have here, thus: [kəráy].
You might be more familiar with this process in the exclamation of annoyance, “Oh, puh-leaze!” There, the ‘please’ can be [pəlíz] or often hyper-stressed to give [pə́líiiz].
But again I’m claiming that this is an Anglophone process that’s taken hold within my lifetime. I haven’t noticed evidence that folks would emphatically say [kəráy] in generations past, for instance in frontier times.
So it seems possible to me that it’s Chinook Jargon that invented the [kʰəláy] pronunciation back then.
And, nobody but nobody who speaks L1 English would stress the [kʰə] part, anyway.
Yet we can infer that Chinuk Wawa speakers associated with Grand Ronde (and probably before the Reservation era, because we know similarly mutated words earlier) did exactly that, giving [kʰə́láy].
And as far as I know from the areal sound change we’re discussing, the schwa had to get stressed in order for the next change to occur, giving [kʰíláy]. That’s a particularly Chinookan sort of a thing to do; in a number of linguists’ analysis, their schwas don’t really exist, so who cares if you stress ’em?!
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! Do you like free stuff? Teach Yourself northern-dialect Chinook Jargon! Free, I say!
And join free Zoom sessions…
Contact me for the Zoom link.
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