more pLEX

[hzenk at PDX.EDU]

Here's the citations I have for pLEX as Chinookan:

Dell Hymes's dissertation (The Language of the Kathlamet Chinook, 1955) has an
entry a-pLXainq 'rotten wood' (in his list of Kathlamet noun stems; in Dell's
alphabet there L = Boas's L, X = FRONT-x).  The copy Dell sent us has
marginalia from him, which includes, written alongside this entry:  "-pLEX
medicine / cf. Wsh [Wishram] -ptLXaman 'bitter taste'" (here we're back to L =
barred-l, E = schwa, X = BACK-x; I write tL for Dell's barred-lambda).  The
dialect for -pLEX isn't explicitly identified, but we have some old materials
from the Wasco language program at Warm Springs which show -pLEX as 'medicine',
as in (alphabet as in original, except L = barred-l, E = schwa, X =
underlined-x; i- is the masculine gender marker, ya- masculine possessor):

Nachimluda chi ibeshten iyapLEX? - Did he give you white man['s] medicine?

K'aya, shawash engi ipLEX nachinluda  -  No, he gave me Indian medicine.

I also found, in Jacobs's Clackamas slip files (U of Washington archives), the
following entry as the name of a plant (here, G = back-g, tc = "ch"):

aGamatcX itcabLEX  'arrowhead its poison/medicine' (tca- is the fem possessive
after i-, which again is the masculine gender marker, tca- agreeing with the
feminine a- of 'arrowhead').

And lastly, the one I haven't been able to track down.  In his 1909 ed. of his
"Chinook" dictionary, JK Gill tried to jazz things up by adding some "Old
Chinook", that is, Chinookan, to what is otherwise a Chinuk Wawa dictionary. 
At least, he did identify these additions with the initials "O.C".  One of
these additions appears in the English - Chinook Jargon part of the dictionary
as "Medicine ... (O.C. Eptlach)".  My suspicion is that he respelled this from
Boas's then available publications on Chinookan somewhere (source of other
"O.C." words), but I have been unable to find where.  Anybody have a clue?

Sam Johnson included "eptlach" in his Chinuk Wawa master file, whence Dale
Kinkade identfies Upper Chehalis pLEX as "possibly a loan from Chinook, via
Chinook Jargon eptlach."   Henry

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