"sewellel" redux; "Cenaqua"

[Dave Robertson]

Alan, Liland,

Your points about dialect differences are well taken.  My general idea, that this form (note that it's /shaw'kwL/, not /shaw'kL/; Lushootseed, like Spokane, no longer makes significant use of /k/) might reflect participation in the areal phenomenon of shared or very similar names for biological entities, stands.

But also -- The variation in form which I find most interesting here is that between /s-waxw-Ebsh/ and /s-xwaxw-Ebsh/; this is simply because my education so far in Salishanist studies has me under the impression that a /w/ ~ /xw/ alternation is rarely a productive one in these languages.  If it's not productive, then the variation between these two forms might be ascribed to another cause, such as the uncertainty with which unfamiliar terms are parsed, in any language.

Examples, as a parallel illustration for you:  The pronunciation "jag wire" in American English for the word <jaguar>.  The ultra-common pronunciation "fermiliar" for <familiar> -- I heard this from a National Public Radio reporter not half an hour ago!  The reinterpretation of Old English [approximately] "brid-guma" into Modern English <bridegroom>.  The difficulty of assigning a written form to the slang term current in my junior high school circa 1980, pronounced [as], short for <awesome>.

In each case, including our Lushootseed question, there is at least potentially the problem of the native speaker's decision upon a form that favors faithfulness to an original phonetic input, or else upon a form that may seem more semantically transparent.

So, if the Lushootseed variation in question is *not* due *only* to dialect differences, then this approach may be worth taking up.  This may be the sort of linguistic indeterminacy that comes up in contact situations.  And it certainly has occurred in varieties of Chinuk-Wawa...Take <kloochman>, for example.

-- Dave

"Alan H. Hartley" <ahartley at D.UMN.EDU> wrote:

>Thanks to Liland for the brief on Lushootseed dialects. I looked again
>at the main entry, and sháw'kL is apparently a Northern L. form, while
>shaw'L is Muckleshoot (SL), and shEw'L is Snohomish (southernmost NL,
>tending to SL). The 19th-cent. Nisqually (SL) form I cited earlier
>(showtl) is practically identical, given the imperfect orthography of
>the time, to the Muckleshoot (SL) form.
>
>I said that Lewis' sewelel is close to shEw'L, but the initial consonant
>differs. The difference may be real, because Lewis would probably have
>transcribed an /sh/ as [sh], not as [s].
>
>Liland's question whether sháw'kL, shaw'L and shEw'L represent normal
>dialectal variation in Lushootseed is for a Salishan expert.
>
>Alan
>
--
"Asking a linguist how many languages she knows is like asking a doctor how many diseases he has!" -- anonymous



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