Sahaptin => Chinuk-wawa, or the reverse?

[Alan H. Hartley]

Dave and all,

> 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/?

I'm no speaker or scholar of Sahaptin, but I can tell you (thanks to
Haruo Aoki's wonderful dictionary) that Nez Perce, the other language of
the Sahaptian family, has a cognate word for 'nine', kuyc [k
glottalized, u stressed, c = ts]. This suggests that if the term was
borrowed, it was probably a long time ago.

Addresses (I haven't corresponded for a while, so I don't know that
these are up to date):

Haruo Aoki  haoki110 at uclink4.berkeley.edu
Bruce Rigsby  rigsby at lingua.arts.uq.edu.au
Noel Rude  nrude at ucinet.com

Best, Alan