Suffix -men in Thompson Salish

[David D. Robertson]

>From Laurence C. and M. Terry Thompson's "The Thompson Language", 1992
(Missoula:  U. of Montana), page 128:

"One suffixal element appears to have been borrowed from English 'man,
men:'  //-men// 'professional person, professional use'...It seems fairly
well integrated into the language now..."

Examples:

ti-men 'water boy (who apparently brought tea to Chinese workers on early
railroad crews'

nc'Eq'c'q'e7qin'm-men  'spike-man, spike driver on railroad crew'

tLuym'xwm-men  '(surveying) engineer'  (< word for 'lay line on ground to
measure')

...as well as the words for 'thief' and 'prostitute'...

The meanings of the above do back a view that this is a post-contact-era
suffix.  Also its use together with the borrowed word /ti/ 'tea' from
Chinook Jargon/English can be taken as a bit of evidence for that view.

I thought it would interest some of you to learn of English (or, in my
view, possibly CJ) 'man' becoming a part of this Indian language's
grammar.  In light of recent discussion here about /-waan/ in Tlingit,
where I said it's probably from CJ/English 'man,' maybe we can begin to
look for more than single-word borrowings into the Native languages:
Often when we're presented with lists of words these languages have
borrowed, it's a bunch of nouns or verbs, rarely affixes or compounds.

Cheers from Biktoli,

--Dave