Source of tanlki "yesterday"

[James Crippen]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 2:38 PM, James Crippen <jcrippen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does anyone know the etymology of tanlki "yesterday"? I have it listed
> in Sam Johnson's 1978 dissertation on Chinook Jargon, but no info on
> the source language. It doesn't look like English or French.
>
> Also is the first or last syllable stressed? I am curious because I am
> looking at a possible loan of this from CJ into Tlingit, but stress is
> probably the deciding factor.

I'm replying to myself to avoid singling out one contributor. Thanks
to everyone for the assistance. I'm going to put down Tlingit tatgé
"yesterday" as "probably from a northern variety of CJ, thence from
Lower Chinook or Kathlamet Chinook". It certainly doesn't look like an
original Tlingit word, and the similarities to CJ tanlki are all too
close for coincidence.

Perhaps the original CJ form loaned to Tlingit was something like
"ta(n)tki". If it were "talki" the [l] would have been converted to
/n/ as a standard Tlingit borrowing change (e.g. Tl. nadáakw < CJ
latáp). If the first syllable coda was just [n] then it probably would
have been retained giving *tangé. So possible forms would have been
one of Francisc's examples "tontleke" or "tantki" with [nt] or [ntL]
as the coda. The other possibility seems to be that the CJ form was
"tatlki", where I can see the Tlingit original form being *tatlgé but
then the /tL/ cluster gets reduced to just /t/ over time, something
which is not unusual for modern Tlingit speakers.

The stress question is still uncertain, since some of you provided
final stress and others provided initial stress. Tlingit doesn't have
lexical stress, but instead has two tones (three in southern dialects)
where high tone in a borrowing often corresponds to lexical stress.
However, I've found this is less consistent with CJ borrowings than
with English borrowings, perhaps because Tlingit speakers had contact
with many different CJ varieties but only a few English varieties. I'm
willing to ignore stress in this case, since the rest of the etymology
seems reasonable.

Mási, gunalchéesh,
James

PS: [L] is a voiceless lateral fricative, [t] is an aspirated
alveodental stop, together they are [tL] which is a voiceless lateral
affricate, and [l] is a voiced lateral approximant (which happens to
not exist in Tlingit).

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