An old Washington State College football cheer

[Dave Robertson]

Klahowya,

Mike, I don't know, but I doubt that the "-e-i" ending reflects an awareness of any language's declensional system but that of Latinate scholarly English.

Speaking of Anglicizing Chinook Jargon, the supposed CJ source of the WSC cheer, /mEkmEk/ ~ <muck-muck>, provides a pretty neat example of the phenomenon.  (I'll put my own nonce standardizations of old-time Anglicized CJ spelling into those < > pointy brackets in the following discussion.)

As is well known among our list members, the (originally regional) English term "high mucky-muck" is also based on <muck-muck>.  Now, a common variant of this form in the printed sources we have is <muck-a-muck> or <mucky-muck>, showing a tendency to insert what I'll call an unstressed syllable [in linguistic terminology, roughly a "light foot"] between the primary-stressed first syllable and the secondary-stressed second syllable of <muck-muck>.  (This is a tendency of English as well as reflecting a universal tendency of human languages.)

Now then, a natural further development of this derived form, <muck-a-muck>, is to conform even more strictly to English-language rules of stress patterning, which can be explained to you native speakers with reference to Mother Goose.  Meaning what?!, you ask.  Think of the rhythm of every nursery rhyme and kids' song in English ... for example, "Solomon Grundy, born on a Sunday" ... or "Hickory dickory dock, a mouse ran up the clock".

You see, in English, optimally we have words and phrases that consist of patterns, where stressed alternate with unstressed syllables, and a *single* heavy / long syllable ("hick") takes as long as *two* light / short syllables ("-o-ry") to say.  (Those of you with training in Latin or Ancient Greek may find these sorts of terms familiar, though I'm definitely not phrasing my explanation the way I would in a linguistics paper!)  What else need I say to show you how natural the development of <muckety-muck> was in regional English?  :-)

So this is another thought emerging at a tangent from the present topic:  As the familiar CJ term

(A) <muck-muck>

became more and more widely known and used in regional English-language contexts, such as in the phrase <high muck-muck>, it tended to develop according to the rules of English, becoming

(B1) <muck-a-muck>, or
(B2) <mucky-muck>

and presumably developing from these into another widely known variant,

(C) <muckety-muck>

and I promise that's all I have to say on this topic on a Saturday night.

Finally, a small affirmation of Mike's other note -- it's not improbable that CJ /mEkmEk/ and English words like "smack" (and "snack") have an onomatopoeic element to them, and it's interesting to compare these with some of the Coast Salish languages having a very similar verb for "eating", tending to a form like /mEq'/ as I recall.

Dave

Mike Cleven <ironmtn at bigfoot.com> wrote:

>
>
>"David D. Robertson" wrote:
>>
>> Klahowya,
>>
>> Here's an odd bit of info that's been an in-joke in my family for years.
>> Only now have I thought of a possible, if remote, connection with Chinook
>> Jargon.
>>
>> One of my brothers found an old Washington State College (now WSU; located
>> in Pullman) book of college songs several years ago, dating to the 1920's if
>> I recall.
>>
>> One of the football cheers in it which we found intensely humorous included
>> the words "Muck-e-i!  Muck-e-i!  Washington-e-i!"
>>
>> I think my family has analyzed these as faux Linnaean, you know, name a
>> species after yourself:  Glossophilus Robertsonii.
>>
>> But out of thin air yesterday (at work, Karen, sorry), this cheer came back
>> to me, suddenly sounding like perverse Popular Chinook Jargon of that era
>> when plenty of folks knew at least a few words of CJ -- one of the
>> best-known being "mucky-muck" for "eat / food".
>>
>> Perhaps a badge of intense regional pride, if so?  If not so, perhaps more
>> of a jeer, like "here's mud in your eye!"?
>
>Maybe "we're gonna eat you, eat you.  Washington!"
>
>>
>> Ikta mesika tumtum?
>
>It's got me wondering if the [-e-i] ending is some kind of declension or
>suffixation from one the languages out Pullman way, i.e. a mock-up of
>some local dialect or creolization of Chinook usage as spoken by local
>natives.  That's your territory, Dave, linguistically speaking.  Am I
>warm?
>
>MC
>
--
"Asking a linguist how many languages she knows is like asking a doctor how many diseases he has!" -- anonymous



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