"lace" and "white people" and Interior loanwords

[David Robertson]

aa, Sally!

lemlmtS for laswe'.  I hope to ask my teacher whether she knows it in
Spokane.

You wonder whether (MT) Salish and Kutenai suy'api need be a direct
borrowing from Nez Perce.  The two former languages are certainly more
intimately associated with one another than with any of their neighbors
except probably Kalispel/Spokane.

Of course, npoqi'niScn or Spokane, as the southernmost end of the dialect
continuum that includes Montana Salish, is often considered a next-door
neighbor to Nez Perce.  Who knows, maybe one way things could have
happened is for Spokane (and snchitsu'umshtsn, Coeur d'Alene) to have
borrowed sooyaapo from Nez Perce, then transmitted the word northwards
and eastwards to the Montana Salish -- and of course to the Kutenai, but
maybe not necessarily *via* that group.

Is the final /i/ of Spokane and Montana Salish (and Kutenai?) suya'pi a
reflection of the Salish lexical suffix meaning "people, tribe" and so on?
I wonder idly.  The Okanagan Salish form is s-uya'pi-x.

By the way, I don't now have a Nez Perce dictionary.  Please take my
spellings of Nez Perce as the work of someone who has a lot yet to learn.

A major point here is that we'd do well to learn about the routes of
transmission of words among the languages of this region.  This will have
as great an effect on our knowledge of Chinook Jargon in the Interior as
it will on our understanding of the past and present cultural situation
hereabouts.

LaXayEm,
Dave



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