CJ "man" borrowed as suffix into another Salish lg

[David Robertson]

I've previously talked about how the Nlhe7kepmxcin / Thompson Salish 
language borrowed "man" as a suffix that expresses someone's profession.  
This was pointed out by the folks who wrote the book describing that 
language's grammar, and they said it could be from English.  I pointed out 
what I thought was good evidence that this was borrowed from Chinook Jargon 
instead.  

For one thing, in Thompson it occurs mostly in words for occupations that 
came to that part of BC about the same time CJ did.  As Bill Turkel argues, 
CJ became an important language in interior BC only when the gold rushes 
occurred, circa 1858 and later.  (Beeson's edition of McInnes' diaries 
emphatically claims 1859.  Hm.)  Examples are the words for prostitute, 
water carrier, and so on.  Some of the words that take the "man" suffix 
seem to have been used in local CJ, in fact.

Now I've noticed that the St'at'imcets / Lillooet Salish language also 
borrowed "man" as a suffix, also expressing one's typical occupation.  Here 
also it looks like CJ played a key role.  Two examples given (in Van Eijk's 
1997 book on Lillooet) come from common terms in local Chinook 
Jargon, "tintin man" (bellringer) and "satiman" (song man, i.e. leader of 
prayers & hymns).  Other examples he gives suggest an extension of the 
suffix beyond "profession", as in the words for footracer and alcoholic.  

I should point out (for you linguists reading this) that the Lillooet 
version of the suffix is stressed when it occurs with the Salish roots 
shown, and unstressed with the CJ roots.  The latter actually replicates 
typical CJ stress patterns in compounds, and may suggest that we're seeing 
different stages of nativization preserved in the lexicon.  (Unless it's 
one of those variably stressed Salish affixes; we'd have to examine the 
roots it occurs with to find out.)  

Also there are two other Lillooet suffixes of very similar form, -m at n (with 
a schwa) "instrument" and -min' (stressed, "leftover matter" [esp. from 
work being done).  Van Eijk notes these may be related to each other, and 
it's not impossible that CJ "man" was at least partly reanalyzed as a sort 
of version of one or both of these.   

The Thompson suffix, as far as I recall, is always stressed and therefore 
looks more definitely like a single coherent morpheme.  Could Lillooet have 
borrowed "man" from Thompson?  

On a different note, Van Eijk analyzes Lillooet "satiman" as coming from 
English "Saturday" + "man".  His reasoning: "referring to prayers said on 
the eve of Saturday".  I strongly dispute this.  Local CJ was heavily under 
the influence of the Catholic Durieu System, in which the "shanti man" 
(song man) was one of the prominent local officials.  The term is frequent 
both in Kamloops Wawa & in First Nations people's own CJ letters.  Some FN 
people even took "Shantiman" in various pronunciations as a surname; one 
pronunciation similar to the Lillooet, "shati" (sing / song), is also well-
known from the Grand Ronde area in Oregon.  Besides, although prayers were 
said on Saturdays at least in some villages, and perhaps more likely so in 
those frequent weeks when the missionary priest was somewhere else, Sundays 
were still the focus of worship services, as we know from the sources I've 
just mentioned. "Satiman" surely comes from CJ. 

--Dave R

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