"lace" and "white people" and Interior loanwords

[David Robertson]

aa, Sally,

It's interesting what happens when a stem gets borrowed into a Salishan
language.

Something like a form /suyapo/ was taken from speakers of Nez Perce, where
of course the internal structure is invisible to me.

Once in use in Spokane, the term evidently gained the "people" lexical
suffix, the /po/ of the NP form perhaps having been hypercorrected to
[p@], that is /p/, adjacent to =/mix/.  Note that certainly in Spokane
(and in Montana Salish?) /o/ is not very 'o-like' -- maybe quite different
from the NP final vowel.

And don't I recall a term /swip=sqa'Xe7/ "draft horse" in Spokane?  No,
but I just looked it up in Carlson and Flett et al.  Then also there's
/swip-s=a'lqs/ "whiteman's clothes", a fascinating form.  So the loanword
became reanalyzed to a root like /swy(a)p/, if we follow Carlson's
analysis -- or /wy(a)p with the s- 'nominalizer'.

Mattina says the root in Okanagan is /wypy/.  I don't know how to doubt
him, so the question for me now is why OK has shifted the front high final
sound into the root.  OK and SP/KA/FL are fairly mutually intelligible and
geographically adjacent to one another, eh, so OK speakers might have
little motivation to miss the meaning "people" in the 'Salish' lexical
suffix.

Might OK have gotten the word for "white person" from Kutenai or another
non-Salishan language?  Direct borrowing from NP can be discounted, can't
it?  These and other questions are brought to you by the letter
'glottalized q'.

Just speculating; cheers,
Dave


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