Palmer's numbers

At , you wrote:
>At 10:40 AM 10/12/98 -0700, David Robertson wrote:
>>
>>LhaXauy at m, kanawi lhaksta!
>>
>>I'd been wondering about your reactions to this posting of mine last =
week.
>>The numbers are unusual, and it would be most interesting to hear =
whether
>>any of you can help explain them. =20
>>
>>Note the unusual word order ("Ten two", "Hundred five") in the tens and
>>hundreds.
>>
>>Note also the unusual root ("Dilo-") in the teens.  I've never seen =
this.
>>Is it Chinookan? =20

Seems pretty much to be a "corruption" of "tahtlum" - would Palmer have
been able to distinguish an unaspirated 't'?  Or would it occur to him to
try and indicate the fricative 'l' of the middle consonant - if that's =
the
prononciation he heard, which it may not have been.  The loss of the =
nasal
also seems rather obvious......

>>Note additionally that 200 vs. the other hundreds shows an unusual =
final,
>>and an analysis of the word for "hundred" into components.
>>
>>Maybe these features, with some others of interest throughout Palmer's=20
>>vocabulary list, point to the particular tribe who most influenced his
>>learning of the Jargon.
>>
>>Again, any comments?

It's those reversed signifiers in the compound numbers "ten two", =
"hundred
five" that have me puzzled.  The necessary usage for numbers in a trade
tongue would have to be pretty consistent from region to region; Palmer's
numbers would have caused a lot of confusion with Jargon speakers in
Astoria or Kamloops, I think.  Either he remembered them wrong, or the
tribe he picked them up from (somewhere upriver) maybe accompanied there
use by sign language somehow in order to clarify the meaning.....i.e.
"hundred", then a big wave, and then "five".  Does anyone know if any of
the upriver languages, perhaps Shoshone, have similar structure to the
number series?


Mike Cleven
ironmtn at bigfoot.com
http://members.home.net/ironmtn/

The thunderbolt steers all things.
                           - Herakleitos