Sahaptin => Chinuk-wawa, or the reverse?

[Dave Robertson]

Klahowya,

As you may have noticed in the older books about Chinook Jargon, "Klickitat"
is often mentioned as one of the languages that contributed some words to
the formation of the Jargon.  Klickitat is one of the dialects of the
Sahaptin language spoken generally in southeastern Washington state and
neighboring regions of Oregon and Idaho.

I'm reading, in Volume 17 of the Smithsonian "Handbook of North American
Indians", a fine grammatical sketch of Sahaptin written by Bruce Rigsby and
Noel Rude.   Among the words provided in the short vocabulary section are
(adapted to Grand Ronde spelling):

k'wayts     "nine"
XatXat     "duck (generic or mallard)"
suul     "salt"

Each of these would be more or less recognizable if you knew Chinook Jargon.
 The last of these could have come directly from English, though, and the
middle one is, like many animal terms, a word shared with many unrelated
languages of the region such as Spokane Salishan and the various Chinookan
varieties.

The first, however, /k'wayts/, stops me in my tracks.  It might seem odd for
a language to borrow a number-word, but in reality this happens very often
in the world.  Hungarian, for example, I recall as having borrowed its words
for "ten" and "hundred" from an ancient Iranian language.  But my question
is, is this word for "nine" a native Sahaptin one, or was it borrowed from
Chinook Jargon?

The Sahaptin numeral system as shown in Rigsby's & Rude's article has
distinct forms for "one" through "five", then obviously compound terms for
"six" through "eight"--these latter looking like they must mean something
like "one more [than five]", "two more...", and "three more...",
respectively.  (Compare this with the etymologies of the Lakhota Siouan
numerals.)  There is a distinct root for "ten".  The form we might have
expected to find for "nine" in Sahaptin would be "four more..."

Any speakers or scholars of Sahaptin out there able to tell me more about
/k'wayts/?

Lhush nanich,
Dave