Sahaptin => Chinuk-wawa, or the reverse?

[phil cash cash]

klahowya,

it has been suggested by Rigsby, in his Ph.d diss, that 'nine' has an early Pre-Sahaptin form
[c'imiskt] and a borrowed form originating from Chinookan such as Wishram [k'wis] and Lower Chinook
[kuist].  the borrowed Chinookan form appears to be restricted only to Umatilla-Sahaptin and for Nez
Perce.

i hear a great deal of CJ words, including Indian English, in Sahaptin speech but rarely in Nez
Perce.  the Nez Perce borrowings that appear in Aoki's great dictionary are mostly from French.

wext naika chako yukwa,

phil cash cash
cayuse/nez perce

ps; i will be posting an interesting CJ word compound using Cayuse, an extinct language, later!

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Robertson <tuktiwawa at NETSCAPE.NET>
To: CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG <CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Date: Monday, January 15, 2001 11:06 PM
Subject: Sahaptin => Chinuk-wawa, or the reverse?


>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
>