Help with -uks?

[David D. Robertson]

Nadja,

Shucks.  Multiple answers to the same question.

Answer 1:  YES.  You're astute to have noticed the suffix -uks, and that
it's mostly for living beings.  You could conceivably apply it to any
Jargon word.

Answer 2:  NO.  This suffix is Chinookan (from the non-Jargon Chinookan
languages).  Consensus says that Jargon doesn't have suffixes, or any
inflections at all.  Therefore, to use -uks would be incorrect.

Answer 3:  MAYBE.  There are borderline cases attested in Jargon of
suffixes possibly being used.  Ones that come to mind
are /iktas/ "possessions; clothing" versus /ikta/ "what; something",
and /ixti/ "once; one time" versus /ixt/ "one".  Intuition says that in
these cases, the members of each pair are related, being based on identical
roots.  But we lack recorded usages that would show us the supposed
suffixes /-s/ and /-i/ behaving productively.  In other words, it hasn't
been shown that any "suffix" in Jargon can be applied creatively to words
other than the one or two or handful it may ever have been found on so far.

Answer 4:  PROBABLY NOT.  There's pretty excellent evidence that Jargon has
what pidgin/creole scholars might call a TMA (Tense-Mood-Aspect) system.
That's where you can follow regular rules to change a verb, by adding
particle words before or after, to reflect tense, etc.  However, these
words in Jargon (like /anqEti/, /alhqi/, /hayu/) appear to be clitics,
which are more independent from the verbal root than suffixes would be.
Together with the preceding three answers, this makes me think it might be
more in line with how Jargon works to invent a pluralizing clitic (separate
word, say hypothetically /ilEp/ or /manak'i/) than a plural suffix
(attached particle like /-uks/).

Answer 5:  EXPERIENCE TEACHES.  Our best guide to talking good Jargon, if
we desire to be guided, is the Jargon that's gotten recorded, i.e. learned
fluently, written down or taped before we came on the scene.  Whether it's
Jacobs' Jargon texts, the collected Jargon wisdom of Grand Ronde elders, or
Bible stories in _Kamloops Wawa_, we're most obliged to imitate what we've
found our forerunners saying in CJ.  Based on this idea, I can tell you I
haven't seen anyone use suffixation freely in Jargon, and therefore I'm
leery of freely introducing it.  However, a language that does suffix very
freely is English, and it's historically appropriate to interject English
or even French words in your Jargon whenever we don't know whether there's
a CJ word for some concept!  This is an idea based on my understanding of
Henry Zenk's thesis on Grand Ronde CJ:  Folks expected such language
mixing, as appropriate, so you could say it's part of a proper knowledge of
Jargon to insert occasional words from another language that's had some
currency in the Pacific Northwest.

Hope this is food for thought.  As you'll always frustratingly hear, nobody
can tell you whether your Jargon is right or wrong, per se, just whether
it's good as in understandable.

--Dave

On Thu, 29 Aug 2002 03:03:51 -0700, Nadja Adolf <nadja at NODE.COM> wrote:

>I found a plural form used for living beings, uks - as in pas
>pasiooks (clothmen or Frenchmen.)
>
>Would this also hold for plants? Does anyone know if this survived in the
>Jargon in any other plural?
>
>(The question is, would it be an incorrect usage to use lemeluks as a
plural
>for lemel (mule.)