Doubling

[David D. Robertson]

DechmEn Henry :-),

Lhush pus nanich mayka t’sEm pipa.  Lili pi wik mayka munk-lhatwa ikta
khupa list.

Your points are very good ones.  Here’s a small elaboration.

Taking *apparently* reduplicated words apart & using just one of the parts
(e.g. tEm < tEmtEm, or wa < wawa) is foreign to the Chinook Jargon that’s
been documented.  However, the presence of seemingly doubled-up words, most
of them generally being lumped together as “onomatopoeia”, is a
characteristic mark of Chinookan and other Indian languages’ influence on
CJ.  Chinookan especially has large numbers of such words, quite a few of
which Colin & Scott have already mentioned on the list this week.

And this Indian influence on Chinook Jargon is felt in another kind of
doubling.  This is what Henry K. alludes to – where you take an existing
word of CJ & double it, getting an added nuance of meaning.  It’s a
productive (commonly used & fairly predictable) thing for native speakers
of Grand Ronde CJ to do, as “BastEn” Henry Z. has noted elsewhere.  I
suspect it occurs in other regions as well, though no examples come right
to mind.  Examples of this “real doubling” are wawa-wawa = to talk a lot
versus wawa = to talk, say; and ayaq-ayaq = to be hurrying around versus
ayaq = quickly.

I’m sorely tempted to go farther and wonder whether this doubling of entire
words is characteristic of Indian use of CJ, and not of non-Indians’
speech.  As Henry K. notes, such reduplication is a common & strong feature
of NW Indian languages, but it’s certainly not the case in English or
French!

About Colin’s question of inventing new words by taking existing ones &
chopping them in half:  Have caution.  Considerations to keep in mind
include whether folks hearing you use these words will understand you, &
start to use them in their own CJ; and whether you’re creating new words in
ways that previous users (including native speakers) of Jargon did.  We
know for sure that they did create new compound words, like  makuk haws for
store, and dala siyaxus for eyeglasses.  They also adopted new words into
Jargon from surrounding languages, according to circumstances, thus giving
us K’alapuyan/Chinookan anthyelh yellowjacket in Oregon, and Secwepemc
Salishan huhulitin musical instrument at Kamloops.  We can’t say whether
they routinely analyzed CJ words into smaller pieces, however.  All the
evidence from Jargon grammar appears to counterindicate such a treatment of
the language.  (But ask a linguist how she/he explains CJ lhuchmEn, iktas,
or tEmwata, to say nothing of additional examples at GR!)

Some languages are remarkable for their speakers’ willingness to creatively
play with speech, and to keep the pleasing results of this play.  Chamorro,
or Guamanian, has assimilated titanic amounts of Spanish to the point where
easily half its vocabulary is from nonnative sources, and has also mutated
its syntax under Spanish influence.  Modern English shows an amazing love
for innovative wordplay, constantly adding newly productive prefixes (like
mega-, super-), suffixes (like –o, -ette), verbs (googling, sex you up),
and so forth.  CJ obviously was changing all the time, too, but like the
two languages just mentioned, did so in its own way.  We should try to
learn that way and follow it; it’s one of the rules of speaking good
Jargon, albeit a less-known one.

A topic like the use of reduplication in good CJ might make for a great
hour of learning at a Chinuk Lu7lu.  Similarly, we might want to focus on
other less-obvious points of Jargon grammar, like when to express the
object of a sentence & when not to.  More on that later.

Cheers & lhaXayam,

--Dave




On Fri, 29 Nov 2002 13:05:19 +0100, Henry Kammler <H.Kammler at EM.UNI-
FRANKFURT.DE> wrote:

>Doubling has been discussed in the past, I think there was a longer threat
in
>1999, which we can conveniently look up now, thanks to LINGUISTLIST.ORG :-)
>
>We should of course distinguish between words that mimick natural sounds
>(onomatopoetic froms) wich seems to be the case with e.g.
>/tiktik/
>/tintin/
>/pishpish/ (from the sound made when calling cats)
>/kaka/
>
>I don't think speakers would consider the involved syllables roots/words on
>their own.
>
>In the languages of the region of course reduplication is very common and
was
>probably at work in CJ too. Doubling occurs in many shapes and can express:
>continuing action
>repetititve action
>action in intervals with pauses
>abundance
>plurality
>being distributed, at several places
>habitual action (similar to agent, a habitual doer)
>
>and more. Let's look for more examples from CJ.
>
>
>Henry K.