A Salish word for 'banana' & CJ 'crooked'?

[David D. Robertson]

Klahawiam,

I'm working on an assignment involving the Thompson River Salish
language.  That's Nlhe7kepmxcin in case you didn't recognize it at
first.  :-)

There's a root in the T.R.S. dictionary (Laurence & M. Terry Thompson,
1996, Missoula, U. of Montana) that's sparsely attested, and T&T indicate
they're a bit uncertain of their analysis of it:

/q'ayEnEc 'curved,' which in this dictionary appears only in the word
for 'banana.'

Bananas are not native to southern British Columbia.

There's another word for 'banana' in this language, which uses a
completely different root.  In situations where folks have just recently
invented ways of talking about a new concept (the students in the
linguistic class I'm TA'ing will recognize the concept of "relexification"
here), this is common.  You get 2 or more new words competing to become
the name of, say, 'banana' in T.R. Salish.

The suggested root-form /q'ayEnEc puts me in mind of 2 possible
etymologies, which aren't mutually exclusive (i.e. they could both be true
for this form):

1)  A Chinook Jargon loan, /q'ay(E)wa 'crooked' -- a common word in CJ.

2)  A typically Salish "lexical suffix" shaped like =enEc, meaning
undetermined but compare with =ene(7)k 'belly', =enis 'tooth',
=en'ih 'ear'.

I have little training in Salish historical linguistics, and haven't
bought Aert Kuipers' excellent new book on that subject (also from U. of
Montana), but a hypothesis forms itself in my mind:  Could this word
for 'banana' be a Salishanization of a Jargon term for an item new to
Pacific NW cultures?  (Still to be checked:  Are there cognates in other
Salish languages for either my proposed root or my proposed suffix?)

This probably goes on the long list of ideas to check out some day when
there's time!  :-)

Cheers,

--Dave