Tired of Pain Court yet?

[Rory M Larson]

> On Vendredi, avril 2, 2004, at 06:11  am, Michael Mccafferty wrote:
>
>> Yes, the pin court or pins courts was the suggestion that  i made
>> to the Siouan discussion list. No one seemed to like it, but it was the
>> only thing that made sense. I'll restate that position to that list.

Michael-- As the one who started the thread, I'd like to
apologize for not having commented on your suggestion,
which certainly is very sensible.  It wasn't that I
didn't like it; it's just that there were so many
reasonable possibilities that were raised then without
anything being a clincher that I didn't know which way
to go.  Some thoughts:

1.  How is the St. Louis area fixed for pines?  There
    are lots of pines in Canada, and there is a famous
    band of pine forest across some of the old Southern
    states parallel with the Gulf, but I usually think
    of the Missouri/Illinois area to be a deciduous,
    oak-hickory region.

2.  Would the French have made and perpetuated such an
    error?  They are certainly fluent in their own
    language, and quite literate.  If it was originally
    Pins Courts rather than Pain Court, wouldn't someone
    at least have left record complaining of the distortion?
    After all, "Short Pines" really does make a lot more
    sense than "Short Bread", so I would expect a shift
    in interpretation to go in the other direction if
    anything.

3.  What about the other places named Pain Court in France
    and Canada?  Isn't it likely that the name was simply
    imported by a homesick French or Canadian?  In that
    case, the name would probably have nothing to do with
    St. Louis, regardless of its original etymology.
    Locally, the name would be meaningless.

4.  What about the punning humor mentioned for the
    voyageurs?  Perhaps the original name was from
    a local Indian language, and the French humorously
    recast its sound sequence into their own language
    as Pain Court.  In this case, Pain Court might have
    been parsed whole, in reference to some other Pain
    Court location, or it could have been parsed to its
    parts to mean "short bread".  In the latter case,
    the pun might have been purely fanciful, or it
    could have meant something to them.  These people
    were presumably very used to dealing with direct
    translations from Indian languages, which were
    likely ungrammatical in French.  Given that they
    had 'a court de pain' to mean 'short of bread',
    is it really too much of a stretch to interpret
    'pain court' to mean the same thing if cast as
    a translation from "Indian"?  I think I could
    take it that way in English either as "short
    bread" or as "bread short" if I understood it
    as a joke on the twisted syntax of a foreign
    language.  In this case, it would fit in with
    the tradition of it meaning "short of bread",
    without having to get there through straight-faced
    French grammar.

In any case, thanks for your suggestion and other
comments!  They have been very enlightening.

Best,
Rory