Talapus 'Coyote'

[Mike Cleven]

"Ross Clark (FOA LING)" wrote:
>
> It's taken me a while to get back to my notes, but I knew I had seen
> something else like this. Gabriel Franchere's Chinook vocabulary has
> 'Etalapass' glossed as 'God, or the Supreme Being'. I wondered about the
> connection with 'coyote' at the time (transformer >> creator?). Is this as
> far as it goes in CJ? Is there a word like this in Chinook proper?

Does the proclitic [-e] (? is that the right word?) have any function in
any of the languages where this formation is found, or in the case of
Cayuse, what it's thought to be related to, e.g. Penutian? - such that
this function would change the basic meaning of a word like "talapus"?
e.g. sacred, high, supernatural, great or something else entirely?

MC