<shabon> ... this gets kind of technical ...

[David Robertson]

LhaXayEm, shiks,

I've had a new thought about the _Kamloops Wawa_ CJ word <shabon> "debt".

Could it be from "j'abonne" (literally, "I make [it] good") < "abonnir"?

Its origin would still not be entirely clear, however.  French was not a
major vehicle of communication for mundane matters in the BC Interior,
except for in-group speech among certain Me'tis, past the middle of the
19th century, I believe.  _KW_ was publishing ca. 1895.  While the
/lipret/ were contributing many, er, technical terms to the CJ they used
for preaching, I hardly expect that "debt; to owe" was a concept
innovated by Catholicism!

Moreover, I do not imagine that a majority or any sizeable percentage
of the shopkeepers in Interior BC were francophone-dominant, as the towns
were almost certainly anglophone-dominant from an early date.  I mention
shopkeepers, as *traders* were not likely to allow, or be able to allow,
anyone to owe them and pay later!  Rather, I might expect any
European-derived loan [heh heh, sorry!] term for this concept to have
entered CJ via frequent, and perduring, contact between Indians and
cheechako -- i.e. in and near permanent settlements.

So perhaps this French term for "debt" entered BC CJ at some time before
the English language became dominant, and at some time after relations
with people of European ancestry were characterized by only sporadic
trading sessions:  By about 1850, let us say, and in the milieu of native
or mixed-ancestry settlements growing around Hudsons Bay Company forts.

The presence of Blanchet or Demers or Durieu in the vicinity of Biktoli
(Victoria BC) at that time might explain how the term in question became
an eventually, via _KW_, somewhat widespread CJ lexeme.   Didn't Durieu
provide the group of new missionary priests including Le Jeune with
"flying sheets" containing CJ vocabularies from Vancouver Island?

Finding an alternative etymology for <shabon> in an indigenous BC language
would only be plausible if we could find such a language having both /b/
and /n/ in its phonemic inventory, and having speakers who were in
extensive enough CJ-mediated contact with outsiders to have contributed
items from their native language to ChInuk.  There are instances of the
latter condition having been fulfilled, e.g. with _KW_ <hpai> "cedar" <
generic Coast Salishan /XEpay'/, and with <haha milalam> < ?Halq'EmEylEm
Salish "holy confession".  The first, phonological, condition has however
not been met; if <shabon> came from an indigenous language of BC I would
expect its shape to be either <shabod> or <shamon>, neither of which is
attested in the entire _KW_ corpus with which I've worked.

Ikta mEsayka tEmtEm?
Dave



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