Yay I finally read Franchere's word list!

[David Robertson]

[I thought I'd share part of an off-list note I sent to one of our list
members.  --  Dave R.]

Franchere's "Ste Kech" ("I love you") isn't what we know as standard CJ,
but it's recognizable as containing (at least) the archaic CJ form most
commonly written as <tikegh> by anglophones, phonetically
~  /tqEX/, "want/like/love".

The <s> which begins Franchere's form may be simply a typographical error;
there are others in his wordlist, since the typesetters probably didn't
speak CJ.  If this is a "typo", then maybe we're just looking at standard
CJ <tikegh>.

If it's not a "typo", maybe it's a Chinookan pronoun, though I have a
strong hunch it's not.  Though I'm no expert on Chinookan grammar, I'd
expect 2 distinct pronouns (a subject & an object) to be incorporated into
a transitive verb, and I would guess that one of those pronouns ought to
look like /n/ (compare 1st person singular /nayka/ in CJ, which comes from
Chinookan).  In fact, Boas in his "The Chinook Indian Language" which I've
just remembered is sitting next to me, says that an "I-thee" form will
contain /-yam-/ (page 584).

Another possibility to consider is that this form, also atypically for
standard CJ but perhaps indicative of an early pidgin CJ with an unstable
grammar (see next paragraph), contains French <je> or <je t'> + <tikegh>!

George Lang, who has a website through the Univ. of Alberta but who has
just become a dean at U. of Ottawa, has written a bit about early CJ as
a "pidgin Chinook[an]".  Many of Franchere's forms, as you can see, differ
significantly from those found in standard (=later) CJ, in having the
incorporated subject & object pronouns & verbal prefixes & suffixes.
Perhaps <Ste Kech> is one of these pidgin Chinookan forms.

Dave Robertson
Grad student, Department of Linguistics
University of Victoria, BC, Canada
(250) 721-4819 phone
(250) 472-4665 fax

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