French in Gibbs' Tsinuk Wawa list

[Mike Cleven]

David Robertson wrote:

> Bonjour,
>
> Thank you for the remarks on French words in Chinook Jargon; you've
> illuminated several points that weren't entirely clear to me before.
>
> It's helpful to hear from someone who is acquainted with North American
> French.  Your notes about "bec" and "maringouin" are very interesting.
>
> About the seemingly unpredictable forms of the definite article, when
> French phrases became adopted into Chinook Jargon -- There seems to have
> been, understandably, no (or extremely little) awareness among the non-
> Francophone speakers of CJ with regard to the gender signification of "le"
> versus "la".  The two appear to have merged, in general CJ pronunciation,
> with accompanying nouns, and tended to be pronounced "le", that is, /lE/.
> A similar process happened with "les".

I meant to comment on this as well; submersion of gender distinctions is
fairly common when the differences can be "levelled".  Informal German and
Plattdietsch does this all the time; Norwegian and Danish formally did it long
ago by merging masculine and feminine into the "common" gender ("en" vs.
neuter "et"); in the case of German and Plattdietsch, all those complicated
die-der-des-dem-etc. can mush fairly convincingly into "de-" (especially if
you're a foreigner, in which case you're not expected to master the
declensions anyway - at least not as a beginner).  This levelling to "de-" and
other simplifications is what partly makes Plattdietsch articles similar to
Dutch - and English.  Anyway, this seems to be the case throughout all of the
lexicon-spelling Jargon-French words - maybe it comes directly from Metis
French?  It's easy enough to assume that non-French speakers would ignore the
subtleties of French vowels (as we maudits anglais in our fumbling attempts to
master la belle langue), and I can't see why people borrowing words (with
articles intact) would bother with the particular gender-vowel when they're
(often) mangling the other phonemes at the same time.

One of my first exposures to French loanwords in native languages was from a
Carrier woman I knew from residence 26 years ago; she'd for some reason
mentioned "laboat" as being a standard Carrier word, and "latab", etc. - the
usuals.  This was before I'd heard of the Jargon.  It would be interesting to
see a study on the pervasiveness of French (and/or English) loanwords in
Northwest languages, and to what degree these common words might have served
as a "French Jargon"; obviously part of trader patois picked up by the various
peoples, but perhaps a means of communication for those in regions where
Chinook was not common......

"Laboat" puzzled me; it's probably due to Metis vocabulary adaptions to French
that "boat" was adapted rather than "bateau"; but it makes me wonder what
happened to the Carrier word for boat - or if there ever was one.  Quite often
English and French loanwords here seem to come from imported goods; things
that had not existed before locally and so the outside word was adapted as
well; typically household and trade goods - latab, lasel, laween, etc.  But
the Carrier country is full of beautiful lakes; the Wet'su-we'ten country in
particular (Bulkley Valley and surrounding areas, more or less); and there
_must_ have been a lake/boat culture.  So either the older word was forgotten
due to the culture/language collapse that accompanied smallpox or "laboat"
refers only to European-style boats (including the bark-canoe-type boats of
the fur companies, which were different from the canim and dugouts common in
the Plateau and on the Coast).


> I base this perception mainly on Grand Ronde CJ as I've heard it.  I'm
> reluctant to judge on the basis of the old written records of the Jargon,
> as they are mostly the work of Anglophone nonlinguists.
>

Well, that "mostly" doesn't include the French fathers, who also ignored
French convention in their recordings, as you note below.  I think the point
is that the native/Jargon adaption of the French terms simply ignored the
formal gender-vowels, as can be expected in a borrowing into a Jargon (whether
it's a pidgin or a creole or whatever besides).


>
> It's highly notable that CJ did not evidently adopt *any* French
> *indefinite* articles.  Compare with the example of the Michif language (a
> mixture of Cree and French), which has as I recall forms like /li narbr/
> for "tree" < "le un arbre", alongside say /li arbr/ and /li zarbr/ (with
> the same meaning!).  French creoles, like that of Louisiana, also
> routinely show indefinite-article merging; I recall the example from that
> language of "un latable" meaning "a table"!)...
>
> CJ /kapu/ "coat":  The word was borrowed in this form without final <t> in
> numerous Northwest languages, for example as /lkepu/ in Spokane.  Maybe
> it's an obsolete form "capot" for current (smaller?) "capote"?

There's also "capeau" in archaic French, I believe, although I don't have a
dictionary resource for that available.  And again, this could be a special
Metis French term that was only ever used on the Prairies and in the North
(and hence went unrecorded by French dictionary writers elsewhere).  I
continue to think that Metis culture and language are key to the origin of the
Jargon, even as they were the main instrument of colonization for the first
few decades; it's also worth noting that of the non-Metis fur company
employees, the managers had been Scots (particularly Orkneymen) and that there
is some influence on Metis culture from them, as well.

>
>
> Let me repeat, beware of the spellings of Chinook Jargon words in the old
> sources!  :-)  They are attempts to represent how the words sounded as
> pronounced by Indians and other people here, and usually do not adhere to
> a French standard.  Even in the "Chinook Rudiments" (1924) of Father Le
> Jeune, a native Frenchman, the CJ words which came from French are very
> frequently spelt as they sound, rather than in standard French.  The same
> is true for Demers/Blanchet/St. Onge; their prime concern seems to have
> been to show how the indigenous speakers of CJ pronounced the French
> loanwords, including the plentiful religious terms introduced probably by
> these missionaries themselves!
>
> About "polallie" ~ /pulEli/:  A term from Chinookan, no?
>
> About "le kye":  From "le caille", "the piebald one", a Canadianism
> according to my Cassell's French dictionary.  Compare "le gley", from "le
> gris".  I feel "le kye" may have been a technical term, meaning a
> particular kind of horse.  Perhaps Nez Perce influence led to the presence
> of a number of horse terms in CJ?

I think you can just generally categorize that concerning the spread of horse
usage among Northwest peoples.  By the time of colonization, the Secwepemc and
Okanagan and Yakima and Cayuse were also horse cultures, even if only just
having become so.  Makes me wonder - has anyone traced the spread of the horse
through the Northwest; might be an interesting study, huh?

"le gley" seems to be another English-French hybrid like "laboat"; maybe also
from Metis usage.....

Mike