Doubling

[David D. Robertson]

For the best advice on this topic, more study & the wise words of others
would be desirable.  Lacking both, I'll boldly explain what I'm referring
to:  Somehow I've gained the impression that there's an (oh boy, here come
the linguistics words) "animate" versus "inanimate" distinction to be found
in Chinook Jargon, at least as some folks have spoken it.

"Animate" in this case:  People.  Anything you'd feel compelled, in our
regional English, to call "he" or "she" -- not "it" -- so, maybe pet cats &
dogs, possibly domestic horses & cows.  I don't mean boats or cars, as we
can comfortably call them "it" (rather than "she") in regional English; you
can't generally do that to kitties & puppies.

"Inanimate" in this case:  Things.  Anything you'd feel you could best
refer to as "it" in Pacific Northwest English.

How the dickens do you make a distinction between these 2 categories, in a
language like Jargon where the 3rd person singular pronoun /yaka/ means
equally "he" or "she" or "it"?  Here's how:

You can't, for 2 different reasons.  Reason 1:  Since we don't have
separate words for "he" or "she" or "it", just one size to fit all,
obviously you can't choose a particular word to make that distinction
clear.  Reason 2:  The subject of a phrase (or of a sentence), when it's
3rd person, is always /yaka/

as in
     /yaka lhatwa/ which can mean "it goes", "he goes", "she goes"

...unless it's a personal name
     (/Dave lhatwa/ "Dave goes" instead of /yaka lhatwa/ "he goes"),

a noun
     (/ukuk man lhatwa/ "that man goes" instead of /yaka lhatwa"he knows"),

...and so forth.  No way to tell, other than your common sense,
which /yaka/ means a person & which means a thing.

But if my ears & mind haven't completely failed me yet, it seems I HAVE
heard a way to make clear whether "it" or a person is meant, when it comes
to the OBJECT of a verb.  What I think I've noticed in some kinds of Jargon
is, there's a difference between sentences like these 2:

(1)     Munk-nanich!
(2)     Munk-nanich yaka!

My perception is that (1) is most likely to mean "Show it [to me/us]!"  My
perception of 2 is that it's most likely to mean "Show him/her [to
me/us]!"  That stuff in square brackets is there because I think it's a
perfectly good, variant way to understand each of these sentences.

What's the difference between the 2 sentences?  A little kid can see it:
#2 has /yaka/.  #1 doesn't.  #2 means "he" or "she"--its object is
animate.  #1 doesn't--it means "it", & its object is inanimate.

In even simpler words:  With subjects ("doers"), always use /yaka/.  With
objects ("do-ees"), you can leave out yaka if the object is a thing.  Final
examples to sum this up, if I'm not wrong:

(3)     Yaka kEmtEks.          "He/she/it knows it."  ("It knows it"--maybe
referring to a computer's abilities.)

(4)     Yaka kEmtEks yaka.     "He/she/it knows her/him."

The possible uses of this mechanism, if it turns out to really be a part of
Chinook Jargon as I suspect, are pretty limited.  But they would certainly
add real color & life to spoken Chinook Jargon, and maybe be taken as a
sign of a certain sophistication in the language.  To put this in the terms
of recent messages on our CHINOOK list, this might be seen as an "elegant
creole" feature as opposed to "crude pidgin" ways of talking.  I really
ought to study this possible grammatical feature more, before I can claim
much of anything about it for sure!

--Dave

***Note--whenever I refer to the pronoun /yaka/ above, I'm deliberately
simplifying the case at Grand Ronde, where other, shorter forms of pronouns
exist.  And of course, the responsibility for errors in the above rests on
my shoulders alone

On Mon, 2 Dec 2002 08:30:37 +1100, Colin Bruce <cbruce at SMARTLINE.COM.AU>
wrote:

>Dave wrote:
>
>     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
>
>
>I hope you can elaborate this on the list.  I'm facinated.