another forwarded posting for the CJ list (fwd)

[David Robertson]

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sally Thomason <thomason at umich.edu>

Subject: saplil


I don't think it's quite right to say that the usual etymology
given for saplil `wheat, flour, meal' is French.  Hale gave a
tentative French etymology, (la) farine, which in French means
`flour, meal'.  But Shaw says this: `The word has been
erroneously supposed to come from French la farine.  It is,
however, a true Indian word, and seems common to various Columbia
river tribes.  Pandosy gives Saplil as Yakima for bread; Lewis
& Clarke write it Chapelell.'  [I *think* all that is a direct
quote from Shaw -- I'm not positive about the 2nd sentence.)
Gibbs also says it comes from Chinook.

A CJ word derived from that French word would likely come out
something like palin or pelin, which isn't all that far from
plil, given that a number of the languages of the region have
l/n alternations.  The s- could be the ubiquitous Salishan
nominalizing (i.e. noun) prefix s-.

Shaw is certainly right about there being a lot of languages in
the area with a word connected with this one: in my files I have
examples from Salishan languages (Nisqually, Chehalis,
Halq'emeylem, Thompson, and Squamish), Wakashan (Nootka), and
so-called Penutian (Yakima, Kalapuya).  All of them have the
initial sibilant, usually s but sometimes sh.  But it's quite
possible that all these languages got the word via borrowing,
some from CJ directly and others from intermediate languages:
the word could easily have traveled fast along with the product.

So, although I don't see clear evidence one way or the other,
the French etymology proposed by Hale doesn't strike me as
far-fetched, and the presence of the word in indigenous languages
is at best a weak argument against an ultimate French source.

   -- Sally

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