/wamusmuski/ in Upper Chehalis (Q'way'ay'ilhq')

[David Robertson]

A brief search of the CHINOOK archives suggests we never got very far in 
the effort to figure out where one or more Salish languages of the Olympic 
peninsula got their words /wamusmuski/ for "cow".  

But I've just noticed in Melville Jacobs' "Clackamas Texts", part 2, page 
561, a clue.  Chinookan languages should be the source, just as Kinkade 
guessed in his Cowlitz dictionary.  But the story still looks complicated.  

In Clackamas, "cows" appears to be /tL'a-imusmusgi'mX/.  (Final stress; X = 
back x.)

With my scant knowledge of Chinookan grammar, I'd guess there are at least 
2 prefixes and at least 2 suffixes here: maybe tL'a-i-musmus-gi-mX.  

(I didn't get much guidance from a glance at Boas' 1911 "The Chinook Indian 
Language".  And I had to take Hymes' dissertation back to the library.)  

Stretching my command of Chinookan beyond the limit, I'd guess that a 
female cow might be wa-musmus-gi[...].  

So, we'd suppose some (which?) dialect of Chinookan borrowed the Chinook 
Jargon word /musmus/, applied the usual Chinookan noun affixes, then wound 
up supplying this word to a neighboring Salish language.  The Salish 
languages we're talking about don't have a "g" sound, so it's not crazy to 
suppose they'd pronounce this word /wamusmuski/.  

Kinkade's Cowlitz dictionary gives a plural form, /wEmusmuskiyumx/ (with 
front x).  The interesting thing is that this Cowlitz form can be analyzed 
as wEmusmuski + the suffix =awmx that's used for plurals.  (See Kinkade's 
grammar sketch, 2.9.2.)  I don't know if the -mX at the end of the 
Clackamas form can be shown to have any meaning in Chinookan.  So, is it 
possible that Clackamas borrowed wamusmuskiyumx back from Cowlitz?  

(The Clackamas speaker who used this word, Victoria Howard, didn't know any 
Salish as far as I've heard; she used Clackamas, English, Chinook Jargon 
and some Molala.  I doubt she had any need for a Salish-sounding version of 
Jargon /musmus/, which was a word she must have known.)  

Or did Cowlitz borrow the word in the form wamusmusgimX, and reanalyze it 
into more Salish-looking parts?  Then the "plural suffix" =awmx would have 
been "removed", in order to back-form the "singular".  

Did Chinookan languages have more linguistic influence on their Salish 
neighbors after contact, despite demographic decline, than Jargon did?  

Or maybe in this particular part of the lower Columbia River, wamusmuski 
was a regionalism in Jargon.  Or...?  

This word remains a bit of a puzzle.  But it does show that Jargon, 
Chinookan and Salish interacted after contact.

--Dave R

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