Question on CJ/Shoalwater Chinook word

[Sally Thomason]

Probably it's safe to assume that Lower Chinook speakers
used a borrowing routine in adopting Chinook Jargon "pus"
with the added French-origin prefix (without semantic or
grammatical content).  This wouldn't necessarily mean that
they were identifying the word with French; it could just
have been a correspondence rule like "foreign words used
in the Jargon should begin with la", or something like
that.

My files too have lepish only from Lionnet 1853.  The other
Chinook Jargon sources for "cat" in my files have no la/li prefix;
and neither do the 20-odd area languages that have also borrowed
this word (though some of these languages might have borrowed
it directly from English, not from CJ).  The forms vary from
pus to puspus to pishpish or the like.  Almost all sources
have a gloss "cat"; several have hayas pus/pishpish/etc.
"wild cat/cougar/tiger/jaguar", and two or three -- not all of
them French sources, so probably not all in the Lionnet text line
of descent -- have "big/wild/etc. cat" without the "hayas" `big'.
Probably by "jaguar" Lionnet just meant the local mountain lion,
not exotic Southwest big cats.

Aside from Dave's lishat, I have just two other words that look
like really good candidates for French-origin l-/la-/li- added
to words of non-French origin: lepishmo `saddle-blanket', which
is apparently from Algonguian, maybe Ojibwa apishimon (spelling
approximate), and lapatak `potato(es)', whose origin is disputed
-- French patate is a possibility, but the replacement of final
t with k would be odd.  The word isn't very well attested in CJ
(I have it from just 4 CJ sources and -- as loanwords? -- in
6 Interior Salishan languages).  This suggests that there was
no major process, within CJ, of adding l-/la-/li- to words that
didn't come from French.

   -- Sally

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