half-words

[David Robertson]

Naika tlus siks, naika tiki wawa kopa maika.

This is a good question, Francisc.  I will be interested to see if anyone
can provide attestations of these words in actual use.  I don't find
the "half" forms in Samuel Johnson's PhD dissertation.

Your hypothesis that some of these might have been willfully created (e.g.
by non-Indian lexicographers who felt that any reduplication sounded
distastefully primitive) is compelling.  Interestingly, according to
recent research by Peter Bakker, published in Silvia Kouwenberg's book,
true reduplication is quite rare in pidgins (like most of Chinuk Wawa e.g.
the examples "hool" and "kullu") but common in creoles (like Grand Ronde
Chinuk Wawa).

By true reduplication I mean doubling of an existing element according to
rules, generating a predictable form and meaning.  So, /pilpil/ "blood"
MIGHT be considered as reduplicated, since there is an existing CW
word /pil/; however, the latter means "red" and you'd have to show a
pattern-governed relationship between this and /pilpil/.  (Maybe in old
Chinookan these two words were related by productive reduplication which
was not continued into pidgin CW.)  Clearer cases of NON-reduplication
seem to be found in /kalakala/ "bird", /mEkmEk/ "eat" etc., unless someone
can answer your challenge by showing actual use of words /kala/, /mEk/ etc.

(There's also the etymological question of /tEmwata/
or /tEmtsEqw/ "waterfall", which contains what looks like an onomatopoeic
syllable comparable with /tEmtEm/ "heart, feelings".)

By contrast you clearly see productive reduplication of an existing word,
with a predictable sense of "distributivity", in the creole Grand Ronde
forms /iskam-iskam/ "be constantly grabbing" <= /iskam/ "take", /kuri-
kuri/ "be running all over" <= /kuri/ "run", etc.  You'll find that most
of the Lower Chinookan reduplicated forms you cite below do exist in CW,
in relation to their "halved" forms, in just this distributive relation.

But the doubling of the existing word /pus/ or /p'us/ "cat" into something
like /puspus/ creates no change of meaning at all.  Therefore it's not
true reduplication in the sense I'm discussing.  Neither is <whane> <=> /
(ie-)kwEnikwEni/ true reduplication, because both mean the same thing.  At
most this is perhaps doubling for stylistic effect.

To sum up, any proof that the "halved" forms were actually used in pidgin
CW would be important information for evaluating Peter Bakker's claim of
the lack of reduplication outside of creoles.  In my own research, I've
checked the Kamloops Wawa variety of pidgin CW versus the Grand Ronde
creole variety.  K.W. shows less than a handful of potentially "truly
reduplicated" forms, like

kah-kah     "here and there"     <= kah     "where, somewhere"
iht-iht     "several, this and that"     <=     iht     "one, a certain
one"

But even if you can show a systematic relation among these formations,
there's still the problem that this is extremely little data on which to
base a generalization.  As one of my professors generalizes, "Four of
anything makes a pattern"!  And I'm not sure there are as many as four
such examples in K.W.  Therefore there's no reduplication in that variety
of pidgin CW.  [And that's interesting because most of its speakers'
native languages were Salishan, which use many kinds of reduplication!]
On the other hand, in creole CW there are lots of examples of doubling,
from which we can tell that reduplication exists there -- and you need to
learn how to use it to become an excellent creole CW speaker.

Sorry to go on so long,

--Dave R.

On Tue, 19 Apr 2005 12:52:11 -0400, Francisc Czobor <fericzobor at YAHOO.COM>
wrote:

>I have noticed that in some sources, CW words that are normally
>reduplicated appear not-reduplicated, or "halved".
>So, in Winthrop's "A Partial Vocabulary of the Chinook Jargon" (1866), we
>have:
>Hool "mouse" (instead of hool-hool)
>Kullu or kulla, kullie "bird" (instead of kala-kala)
>Pusse "cat" (instead of puss-puss)
>In G. Lang's Glossary of Wawa
>(http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~chinook/Innsbruck/glossary.htm) I've found:
>cik "wagon" (instead of chik-chik / tsik-tsik)
>Were such "halved" words circulating in some form of CW somewhere /
>sometime? Or this simplification is just a fancy of some authors?
>Anyway, it was a tendency of CW to "halve" some reduplicated Chinookan
>words, for instance:
>CW kaw "to bind" vs. LC kaw-kaw (Gibbs)
>CW khEl "hard" vs. LC khul-khul (Gibbs)
>CW kwan "glad" vs. LC kwan-kwan (Gibbs)
>CW pil "red" vs. LC tlpelpel (Gibbs), hlpElpEl (Curtis*)
>CW shEX "rattle" vs. LC shukhshukh (Gibbs)
>CW uk beside ukuk "this, that", LC. okok (Gibbs)
>CW whane "sea-gull" (Demers/Blanchet/St.Onge) vs. LC ie-kwEni-kwEni

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