Pattern in loans in Lushootseed?

[Dave Robertson]

Hi,

The Bates-Hess-Hilbert Lushootseed Dictionary has these two items:

/bulla/ "mill", from Chinook Jargon (and ultimately French) though attributed tentatively to English(!) <mill>

/bil'7alla7Eb/ "confess" (and /XaXa sbil'7alla7Eb/ "confession" in church); compare _Kamloops Wawa_ Chinook Jargon <haha milalam> "idem", and a very similar phrase in Upper Chehalis Salish.

What stands out as I look through the Lushootseed dictionary is the doubled consonant /ll/.  In the Salishan languages, gemination (lengthening of a consonant, as in Italian /gatto/ or Japanese /seppuku/) is uncommon, if extant at all.  Rather, two identical consonants in a row will be pronounced separately, so I'm parsing the above pair of words into syllables as /bul.la/ and /bil'.7al.la.7Eb/.  And as a rule you only get a sequence of identical consonants in Salish *at morpheme boundaries*--counting reduplication as a morpho-phonological process.  Well, we know that /bulla/ comes from a single morpheme in Chinuk-Wawa, and to the best of my knowledge, /bil'7alla7Eb/ is unlikely to contain a morpheme break between the two "l's".

Does any of you know why B, H, & H have written these with doubled consonants?  Does it have something to do with their being loan words, perhaps with unusual kinds of "l" sounds in them?  (I'm unsure what language is the source for /bil'7alla7Eb/, but it's so widespread as a term for an imported Catholic practice that I guess it's a contact-propagated item.)

Thanks,

Dave
--
"Asking a linguist how many languages she knows is like asking a doctor how many diseases he has!" -- anonymous



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