Chumash Dictionary Fragment — m entries only

On these pages you'll find a short section of a larger Samala-to-English dictionary. It includes only Samala words that start with m.
It's in two forms:
	a PDF version enhanced with more examples and more information than the web pages below
	five web pages, for words starting with ma,  me,  mi (and m)  mo and  mu
You may find the information below useful in understanding how these dictionary sections are organized.
Samala and the other Chumash languages are challenging to dictionary makers.
Before you learn about the issues in putting Chumash into dictionary form, here’s the situation with English. English is fairly easy to alphabetize into dictionary form. A good many English words start with a root and add suffixes after it, such as “build,” “building,” “buildings,” “builder,” “builders,” etc. All of these forms of the word fit neatly under “build” as a main entry.
English has a fairly small number of prefixes that show up before the root, such “mis–take,” “dis–like,” “un–tie,” “re–paint,” etc. The meaning of these prefixes is fairly clear and it’s easy to come up with lots of examples of each. We have no trouble breaking these words down into their component parts.
The Chumash languages are organized around roots and prefixes, elements that go before the root and add additional meaning. Prefixes are written with a hyphen after them — such as mati– "with difficulty" — to show that they link up with some element that follows. Samala has an inventory of well over a hundred prefixes.
Many of these prefixes have very clear meanings, similar to the “dis–“ of “dislike” or the “re–” of “re–paint.” It would make a dictionary far too long to include all of the possible combinations of root plus prefix, so the totally predictable combinations are left out, such as words with the future tense prefix no– “will.”
English also has some words — mostly from Latin — that show prefixes with stems that may not appear by themselves as independent words, such as “con–ceive,” “de–ceive,” and “re–ceive.” It’s not easy to say exactly what the various parts of these words mean, and we tend to think of them as single units even though historically they break down into separate elements. The dictionary doesn’t help to show their relationship, since “con–ceive,” “de–ceive,” and “re–ceive” all show up on different pages.
The Chumash languages include a great many words that are similar to “con–ceive” in English. Often a combination of prefix plus verb has a meaning that you'd have trouble guessing just by knowing what the separate parts mean. For example, itaxmay “to be astonished” comes from itax– “having to do with hearing” plus may “to overwhelm.”
This dictionary fragment lists combinations of prefix plus verb stem in three places, to improve your chances of finding them and also to give you more of a sense how the language works. For example, a verb such as mel–eqpey “to inherit” shows up
	under the root eqpey “to stick to”
	under the prefix mal– “of birth, pregnancy and inheritance”
	under the combination of prefix plus root — meleqpey

Structure of the entries

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	Each entry has a definition in English.
	Examples of the word in a phrase or sentence show up on the next line, introduced by "ex."
	If the Chumash word breaks down into smaller parts, they are listed after the definition. This analytic information is in the format: from mal– “of inheritance” + eqpey “to stick to”
	A question mark follows the analytic information when it is uncertain or conjectural. For example, the entry after mulam "creek, arroyo" offers a tentative etymology: from mi– "place" + ulam "creek, flood"?
	A few of the verb roots never show up without some prefix or other, rather like the “ceive” of “con–ceive” and “re–ceive.” These items are called “bound” roots and they show up with an equal sign as a sort of industrial-strength hyphen to indicate the strong bond. For example, the root in itax–may “to be astonished” is a bound root =may.
	Some terms for body parts and relatives are labeled (–alien) because they are inalienably possessed, a technical term meaning that they never show up without some possessive marker such as k– “my” or s– “his/her.”

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