Um...Re: mush/mouche/marche/mash/march/much

[Mike Cleven]

Dave Robertson wrote:
>
> Howdy,
>
> At this point it would not seem likely that "mush" came into
English via
> Chinook Jargon.  In fact, I'd make a casual bet that CJ in the
Klondike
> (the classic setting for the popularization of "mush") was
about as useful
> as sign language.  Admittedly the documentation is sparse, but
I've probably
> read enough to have a feel for the "socio" side of that Gold
Rush, and my
> sense is that Chinook Jargon was useful throughout the
Panhandle of
> Southeast Alaska, including Skagway.  There, with CJ you could
hire yourself
> a crew of Indian guys to help pack your kit over the Pass, and
maybe some
> ways beyond depending on your finances, the weather, and luck.
I
> extrapolate that plenty of cheechakos tried using Jargon as a
contact lingo
> with Native people in the Klondike per se, and that some of
these Indians
> picked up some Jargon.  But it would seem as though Outsiders
extremely
> quickly became the huge majority of the population of that
region, and
> pretty much managed by themselves to get along without the
sort of reliance
> on Indian goodwill characteristic of the histories of Puget
Sound or the
> Columbia-Willamette regions.

Skookum Jim (one of the co-discoverers of the Klondike
goldfield) was a
Tahltan, but it's hard to say where he learned his Jargon and/or
acquired his name; Seattle being perhaps every bit as likely as
Juneau
(Skagway wasn't much until the Klondike frenzy was underway, and
was
hard-core Tlingit anyway, uncomfortable turf for a Tahltan
AFAIU).  My
own feeling on the Jargon in the Klondike is that it was brought
there
courtesy of all the outfitting shops in Vancouver, Victoria and
Seattle
who sold to the sourdoughs and sundry all the penny-printed
lexicons
that turn up so commonly in antiquarian bookshops today; the
same with
Skagway and Haines, where I'd guess that the Jargon only showed
up with
the boatloads of aspiring tycoons, although certainly the
Tlingit were
common visitors to the south Coast by this period and some of
them, at
least, must have picked up the Jargon and could field questions
and the
like from the hiyu Bostons who tried to talk to them speaking
through
the little books.  But you're right, I'd guess, about the Jargon
never
being much more useful than sign language, except maybe as bar
slang
amongst the sourdoughs themselves; and certainly not in any form
similar
to how it was used in the Georgia Strait-Puget Sound or BC
Interior
(areas where it was still alive, despite its apparent
obsolescence
farther south from the 1850s onwards....)

the HBC had had a couple of outposts up there - Atlin and
Whitehorse I
think, but I'm not sure at the moment - and it may be that
they'd
introduced the Jargon there as a trade language; it never had
taken hold
in the Carrier-Sekani/New Caledonia, as observed by someone else
here a
while ago about French borrowings into Carrier.
>
> At any rate, more probably this word came from earlier contact
with
> French-speaking woodsmen, traders for example.

True; but in this case you have to look east towards the Metis
country
and/or the Great Lakes; and to a much earlier (and apparently
unrecorded) provenance.

>
> There is no plausible connection with French "la mouche" (a
fly--the insect)
> nor with any denominal verbs derived from it.

Agreed; nor apparently with "moucher" => "to blow", unless it's
something like "go like the wind".  The problem here remains the
geographical origin of the usage; dogteams were known to the
east; I'm
not sure if they were used more (or less) by the Inuit than the
Cree or
Dene peoples; on the other hand the pedigree of the favoured
dogs for
this industry were Alaskan and Siberian; so perhaps we might
look to an
aboriginal language, even a Siberian one, for the source tongue
for this
word.  If it _is_ direct from the French "marcher", then we have
to
consider "who and where" on that one; there were next to nil HBC
employees (French or otherwise) in either the Yukon basin (later
the
Yukon Territory) and even less so in Russian America.  Hmmmm -
could
there be a _Russian_ term that makes sense here?
>
> That old citation in the OED, though, is of interest in
raising the question
> of hypercorrection.  Perhaps our English-speaking author in
that instance
> had never heard the word "mush" said, and knowing it to be
"French", gave it
> the ever-popular Continental Vowel Treatment.  This is a fancy
way of saying
> he got all hoidy-toidy.

Better read Alan's post/citation again, Dave:  the "English
author" in
question was the explorer Kennicott, and it's presumably a
quotation
from his journals:
[1862 R. KENNICOTT Jrnl. in J. A. James First Sci. Explor.
Russian Amer.
(1942) 130 My dogs are dogs! and we will mouche very likely,
after all.]
I'm not sure that "hypercorrection" was popular in Brito-English
in the
1860s; quite the contrary, unless French is being directly
quoted as
such; the English had a nasty way of undoing any continental
trait of
borrowed words/names (Beauchamp=>Beecham).  As for Kennicott,
although
I'm not that familiar with his journals but IIRC he doesn't fit
the
description of "English author" any more than Mackenzie or
Thompson
might......