2-mouthed lampreys? Re: Origin of "Coquille"?

[hzenk at PDX.EDU]

Or to go a bit farther out on this limb, since lampreys (and spiders)  
attack their prey by clinging onto and sucking out the latters'  
juices, maybe the dual refers to the predator-clinging-to-prey pair?   
Many Grand Ronde elders remember going lamprey fishing with their  
families.  Usually they used a long pole with a 3-pronged hook to pull  
the lampreys off of rock faces at falls (the lampreys cling to the  
rocks with their sucker mouths and inch their ways up).  To the kids  
(that is the now elders) fell the task of grabbing the lampreys and  
throwing them into gunny sacks.  Careful, they'll snake around and  
grab you with their suckers!  An older method was to take them by  
torchlight as they swam up creeks at night, grabbing them out of the  
water hind-most first (or hmmm, by pairs?).  Henry


Quoting Dave Robertson <ddr11 at UVIC.CA>:

> Another suggestion about Chinookan nouns with the dual prefix is not mine,
> I think.  It may have come up on this list a few years back.  Someone
> suggested the dual "s-" might carry the sense "a couple of____".  This use
> of dual number and its equivalents is common in the world.  In English we
> have "a couple of___" / "coupla", Hungarian, Slovak and Slovenian
> have "pAr" (pair) in the same sense, and so on.  Could Chinookan have
> used "s-" to refer to things usually harvested "a couple" at a time?  (By
> the way, I don't know how to fish for lampreys.)
>
> --Dave R
>
> On Sat, 5 May 2007 19:58:23 -0700, hzenk at PDX.EDU wrote:
>
>> In a similarly speculative spirit, he [Dell Hymes] wondered if lampreys
>> could be perceived as having two mouths, hence explaining the dual.
>
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