French in Gibbs' Tsinuk Wawa list

[janilta]

Hello, Mike,

Thank you for your message.
I see that my remarks about the le/la confusion also struck you.
I think we cannot get any satisfactory answer to this very issue since
the borrowing process was long and done by various populations, as you
mentioned, not only French native speakers.
It is possible that for many speakers most words were pronounced with a
mixed le/la sound, but I keep thinking that it is not very logical that
they have uttered a le-sound in front of la-words since the very source
may not have make the mistake.
But languages are not logical !!!
In fact, I do think that, as I mentioned before, many of these words may
have entered the Jargon with their plural form (les being close to le),
which is quite logical, even in English (teeth, scissors, etc).

You are right when you write that informal German and its dialects have
often a mixed sound for the articles, but this does not imply that the
speakers mix the genders and they would never put a 'di' (die) sound in
front of a 'de' (der/das) word, or a 't'/'s' sound (das) in front of
another gender word.
Dutch (ABN), as well as standard Swedish (Riksvenska) or Danish
(Norwegian maintains the distiction between masculine and feminine
words, strongly in Nynorsk, less in Bokmaal, even if most people would
say 'ei sol', not 'en sol' I think) have only a neuter/common gender
distinction but normally no-one would ever put a neuter article in front
of a common gender word.

Once again, simplification does not imply errors and if the fist process
is quite logical in the case of the French borrowings in NorthAmerican
languages, why would these people have put a 'wrong' article in front of
words whereas this le/la sound wasn't an article for them but only a
part of the word. Anyway, the way Jargon words are still pronounced by
native speakers is the correct way, a language being a living body.

I do agree that a comprehensive work on the French borrowings in the
Native languages of the Great Plains and Westwards would be very
interesting since words as 'mehsie' (merci) or 'kushu' (cochon) seem to
have been used over very large areas...

Thanks again, regards, Yann.