"Spuzzum" excerpt

[David Robertson]

LhaXayEm.  Qhata mayka ukuk lhush san?

What is the most valuable in (evidently) Annie Zixtkwu York's recounting
of local history is the setting which she provides us.  By this, I mean
that Annie's account tells us, mostly explicitly, who knew which languages
in that area of BC a hundred-odd years ago.  This is information that is
lacking, and difficult to obtain, for most studies of ChInuk hitherto.

That's my opinion.  Then there's the tremendous humor of the dialog she
quotes to us, which could serve as an inadvertent model for creative,
punning, use of the language.

And we have the words which the people involved were attempting to use.
We can see the difficulty that people seem to have had with English, and
by implication the relative ease with which ChInuk was acquired by them.
Let it be noted, I don't see that it was necessarily the sounds of English
that were harder, and those of ChInuk easier to learn -- Nlaka'pamux
Salish has one of the more extensive phonemic systems I've ever seen, and
a native speaker would perhaps not have much trouble with English
pronunciation.  And the grammar of English is from a Salishan perspective
more or less equally as easy as that of ChInuk.

It may be rather that ChInuk was easier to learn because
of social factors:  Other Indians already spoke it well, and these were
Indians with whom one could interact in greater depth (for purposes of
language learning) than one might with Whites et al.

Maybe I'll comment more on individual words in that text in another email.
"Holaporte" made me laugh out loud because it sounds like a complex
utterance in the source language (French?  CJ?) misunderstood as a single
word.  Like the many cases where people newly in contact with American
soldiers refer to them as "goddamns".

One specific note:  In Npoqinishcn (Spokane) Salish, there is the word
/l'pot/ --linguists, note the glottalized /l/ diminutive!-- for "a cup".
This presumably comes from ChInuk or from metis French, but we can wonder
whence comes the final /t/.  Misunderstood liaison phenomena?  Cf. the
evolution of "capot" in ChInuk?  Cf. also Mitchif "un larbr/un zarbr" etc.

Pi alta na lhatEwa.

Dave







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