Kiksht -Reply

[Robert Moore]

Hi,

As usual, Tony Johnson has been able to move more quickly than I have, and
his response seems to me quite on-target, though there are a couple of
(very) small difficulties/ambiguities, that originate not with Tony, I
think, but with the printed material itself.

As he said, there is a reference--the earliest one I can think of, too, off
the top of my head--on p. 192 of Sapir's Wishram Texts, and it's
accompanied by a footnote, presumably written by Sapir; here is the textual
passage (it concerns omens--rainbows, moon-signs, etc.--that have been
described in preceding passages); I've "modernized" the transcription (and
transliterated, so that -sh- here = the -c- of Sapir's orthography, and
-ch- here = ES's -tc-):

        qídau kánawi dáichka kíksht adáwawat

--which Sapir renders (in his facing-page translation) as

        thus (believe) all those who speak as we do.

--and that English sentence bears footnote number 1, to be discussed in a
minute.  But the original sentence could be given a more literal (and more
awkward) kind of interlinear gloss, with morphemic analysis, as follows:

        qídau   kánawi  dáichka    kíksht       a-dá-wawat
        thus    all     those      Kiksht       it(Fem)-their-speech

--here, the first element of the last word, a Feminine Sg. pronominal,
"agrees with" (cross references) the word Kiksht, which (like all or most
[pro]nominal forms having to do with speech) is classed as Feminine, even
though it itself bears no marking of Number/Gender; the second element of
the last word, -da-, cross references the independent pronoun daichka
(which could've been written as da-ichka here), a 'Plural' form.

Tony is of course absolutely right in saying that 'Kiksht' is "the
language's description of itself," and it's interesting to note that from a
grammatical point of view it functions here (and elsewhere) virtually as an
Adjective (hence, "kiksht [is] their speech"--somewhat like "green is my
valley").

There is another slightly more straightforward (from an English point of
view) way of designating "the language" as such, and this is to take the
"base" form _kiksht_ (which from the point of view of Chinookan "parts of
speech" looks and behaves like a "particle"--parallel in this way to many
other "adjective"-like words in Chinookan, including words for colors), and
add a suffix _-mt_; thus,

        Kiksht-mt       'Kiksht speech'

--parallel with (-lh- is "barred el," -X- is velar/uvular ["back"] x):

        lhmXwli-mt      'Sahaptin speech'
        bashdn-mt       'English speech'

These are the forms to use if one is asking for a translation, for someone
to say something "in Kiksht" or "in English," for example.  Or, say, if one
were listing the languages someone spoke, one would use these forms.

The difficulty is a minor one, and is contained in the footnote (a rare
lapse on the part of the otherwise punctilious Sapir): the wording suggests
that Kathlamet and Clackamas speech are included natively in the "Kiksht"
designation, and therefore that "Kiksht" and "Upper Chinookan" are
synonymous; here is the footnote, as it appears [minus a couple of
parenthesized items that aren't germane] at the bottom of p. 192:

        1 Literally "they 'kiksht' their-speech."  "Kiksht" is a term that
        embraces the various probably mutually intelligible dialects of
        Upper Chinook:  Wasco, Wishram, White Salmon..., Hood River and
        Cascades..., and Kathlamet and Clackamas.

In fact, "Kiksht" and "Upper Chinook(an)" are not synonymous, nor are they
coextensive: in the Native classification, and in the anthropologists',
'Kiksht' designates a cluster of intergrading dialects/localisms, each one
of which was undoubtedly quite mutually intelligible with those adjacent on
either side, and mostly mutually intelligible w/respect to all the
others--but Kathlamet doesn't belong in this group.  The Kiksht dialects,
then, are (moving from east to west): Wishram, Wasco, White Salmon, Hood
River, Cascades, and Clackamas.

There is probably little point really in differentiating Wasco from Wishram
(hence they're usually hyphenated, in one order or another), and the
designation "Cascades" probably takes in whatever may have been the
negligible differences among White Salmon and Hood River forms of speech
(these two, similarly, are right across the river from one another).
Here's the point:  Kathlamet, while it DOES belong to the "Upper Chinookan"
grouping, is NOT included in "Kiksht," by Indian people or by
anthropologists; a native speaker would recognize it as a closely related
language (as have friends of mine at Warm Springs, when I've read aloud to
them from the Boas texts), but it is not "mutually intelligible" with any
of the Kiksht dialects, so far as I know.

So to keep things straight one has only to remember that "Upper
Chinook(an)" comprises Kathlamet, plus the Kiksht cluster of
dialects--hence:

        Lower Chinookan
                Clatsop
                Shoalwater
        Upper Chinookan
                Kathlamet
                Kiksht dialect-cluster
                        Clackamas
                        Cascades (i.e., Hood/Dog River, White Salmon, etc.)
                        Wishram-Wasco

If you look again at Sapir's footnote, you can perhaps discern that he may
have meant to imply a grouping of W-W, Hood River, White Salmon, and
Cascades (hence the comma preceding Kathlamet)--but the wording, and/or the
formulation there are clearly inadequate and misleading.  The seeming
lumping-together of Kathlamet and Clackamas in the footnote (on the other
side of the Cascades, and of that comma) is perhaps understandable from a
geographic point of view; Clackamas, whose speakers resided around
Willamette Falls (near present-day Oregon City), may seem to be a
geographic outlier w/r/to the rest of the Kiksht dialects, but that is only
if you assume that crossing over Mt Hood was a big deal, which it wasn't
then, and isn't now (weather permitting--now as then).  Kathlamet people,
it's true, did live along the Columbia River, but west of the confluence
with the Willamette.  From the very few bits of fragmentary data we have on
the languages around the Willamette-Columbia confluence (that go by names
like "Multnomah" and "Wacanasisi" in the literature, such as it is), these
seem clearly to belong in the Kiksht grouping, and do not appear to
resemble Kathlamet.  But again, this is on the basis of not much more than
a handful of lexical items.

Some people--Dell Hymes, if I remember right, perhaps also Silverstein--at
one time or another have proposed that Chinookan be divided into not two
but three "language"-level groupings, "Lower," "Middle," and "Upper"; that
way, Kathlamet would be by itself as "Middle Chinookan," and "Upper" would
then in fact be a synonym for "Kiksht."  But this idea never really "took,"
for some reason.  And that may be just as well, since the
confusion/ambiguity is already enough to cause problems of the sort
represented by Sapir's footnote.

Indeed, the "Upper" versus "Lower" distinction was proposed (by Boas &
Sapir) in the first place mainly to reflect differences in the Tense
systems of these languages, and in that respect Kathlamet more closely
resembles Kiksht (though with some important differences) than it does
Lower Ch., as Silverstein showed in his monograph* on the Tense-Aspect
systems in the family as a whole.  So probably the existing arrangement,
awkward and/or confusing as it may be at first, is probably as good as any,
especially considering the paucity of data on languages from the "middle"
section of the river (around present-day Portland, for example).

Sorry this went on for so long.

Cheers,

Rob

Robert E. Moore
Department of Anthropology
New York University
25 Waverly Place
New York, NY    10003

212-998-8559 (tel)
212-995-4014 (fax)
<rem10 at is5.nyu.edu> email

*Silverstein, Michael.  1974.  Dialectal developments in Chinookan tense-
        aspect systems: an areal-historical analysis.  International Journal of
        American Linguistics, Memoir 29.




>Alan,
>
>I'm not the best person to respond to this, but my understanding of the
>word "kiksht" is that it is the language's description of itself.  I
>remember one quote from page 192 of Sapir's Wishram texts where the
>informant states in Wishxam, "they 'kiksht' their-speech."  This is in
>reference to all of the upper chinook speakers.  Sapir's texts were
>collected in 1905 and I imagine that Boas, or someone, has an earlier
>recording.
>
>LaXayEm--Tony A. Johnson
>Sawash-ili?i "Grand Ronde, OR"
>
>>>> "Alan H. Hartley" <ahartley at D.UMN.EDU> 01/31/00 12:45pm >>>
>Can anyone tell me the origin, and earliest occurrence, of the name
>KIKSHT, one of the Upper Chinookan languages (including the Cascades,
>Clackamas, and Wasco-Wishram dialects)? I've got a cite from 1940 but
>assume there's something earlier.
>
>Thanks for any help.
>
>Alan