St'at'imcets-English contact in Hill-Tout

[David Robertson]

As an appendix to The Salish People, ed. by Ralph Maud, published in 1978 
by Talon Books of Vancouver, Charles Hill-Tout's 1905 "Report on the 
Ethnology of the Stlatlumh of British Columbia" is included.  A 
grammatical sketch of St'at'imcets or Lillooet is provided.

Under the heading "Gender", H-T notes "The term 'old' used substantively 
is sometimes differentiated to mark gender.  Thus: kutLme'n, old-man; 
kutLmi'mEn, old-woman."

As can be seen from the paragraph that precedes this observation, and from 
a look at the accompanying vocabularies, the St'at'imcets words for man 
and woman are skauyuq and syakEtca.

The forms me'n and mi'men appear to be borrowed from English or Chinuk 
Wawa "man / men" and English "woman / women".

(Geeky note: One reason mi'men probably is from English, besides its 
sounding a lot like our word, is kind of roundabout. If it were based on a 
Chinuk Wawa borrowing of "man" into St'at'imcets, that word would have had 
to undergo typically Salish 'reduplication' of its first syllable.  You 
could generate a form that looks like mi'men this way, but I reckon it 
would mean something like "little man".  I have doubts that this 
hypothesis would be easy or worthwhile to defend.)

This isn't necessarily Chinuk Wawa, but it gives you a small idea how 
intense the contacts between languages were in BC a century ago.  

I find these interesting also because the neighboring Thompson, that is 
Nlhe7kepmxcin, language also borrowed a form me'n, either from English or 
from Chinuk Wawa "man".  There it's lost its independent existence and 
become a bound form.  In other words, me'n is now only a suffix on other 
words in Thompson, denoting professions, according to the book-length 
grammar sketch by Larry & Terry Thompson.  

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