variant of Multnomah

[Alan H. Hartley]

Thanks to Tom Larsen, and to Liland Brajant Ros' who wrote:
>
> My impression is that in a wide variety of WA/OR languages there is a
> tendency to replace nasals with voiced stops. This appears to have been an
> accelerating inclination in Lushootseed over the last couple hundred years,
> and is of course very marked in Quileute. Seems to be a general regional
> tendency. And at least within the Salishan Lushootseed group of dialects it
> doesn't seem to have been sudden or across the board.

Good analogy: Suttles and Lane (HNAI VII. (1990) 485) credit Hess (1976)
for pointing out that the "voiced stops b and d developed within
historic times from nasals m and n, and these nasals are still used in
some proper names and ritual terms and in some styles of speech".

A good example is provided by English ethnonyms in -mish (Stillaguamish,
Snohomish, Suquamish, etc., etc.). They come from archaic Lushootseed
names in -ams^ 'people' which has evolved into -abs^ in the modern
language.

Interesting to note that, with only 2 exceptions in the Indian Affairs
Report for 1877 (Swo-Kwabish and Sto-lo-qua-bish), all the 19th-century
Eng. records I've found have -m- and not -b-.

Does anyone know if a similar diachronic or dialectic variation exists
in Chinookan (or other PNW languages)?

Alan