/pLEX/ is Jargon?

[Sally Thomason]

Dave asks whether Columbian /pLEX/ `Indian dope, love medicine'
might come from Chinook Jargon.  It's possible, but I'd say
fairly unlikely, because it seems to be a native Salishan
word.  Kuipers' 2002 Salish Etymological Dictionary has an
entry *p at laX (where @ = schwa) `to put a spell on; to tell',
with cognates in Lushootseed, Upper Chehalis, Thompson, and
Okanagan.  The meanings are things like "what is put on a
person's possessions (esp. clothing) to gain power over him"
"(love) charm", and "to dope".  Kuipers doesn't have a 
Columbian cognate in his list, probably because he didn't
have access to Dale Kinkade's unpublished lexical materials;
I don't have Dale's published Columbian wordlist at hand, so
I can't check to see if it's there.

I haven't run across the word in my fieldwork on Montana
Salish, but I just checked the 19th-century Jesuit dictionary
of the language, and there it is: /pLaXt/ `love potion' (the
Jesuits actually gloss it as "philtre", which I had to look
up as it is not part of my active vocabulary...); also
pLaXt-m-n `I give him a philtre'.

Now, there *are* some words that apparently come from Chinook 
Jargon in Montana Salish, but they'd probably have gotten into 
this language from a language farther west, because by all
accounts the Montana Salish people never used the Jargon.
Most or all of the other tribes with cognates for this word
(as listed by Kuipers and reported for Columbian in Dave's
message) did use the Jargon; I remember Larry Thompson telling
me years ago that the husband of one of his main Thompson River
Salish consultants spoke Chinook Jargon, for instance.  So it
is possible that all the Salishan languages that have this
word got it directly or indirectly from Chinook Jargon.  But
in the absence of a solid CJ source, the default assumption
must be that the word is a native Salishan word, inherited from
Proto-Salishan.

   -- Sally

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