Another example of doubling....

[Mike Cleven]

At 11:00 AM 2/11/99 +0100, Henry Kammler wrote:
>> One thing that did occur to me - "pish" in single form would be taken as
>> "fish", whereas the "pish-pish" seems invariably to be cat or cougar (in
>> the Puget Sound-Columbia area, anyway).  Would "puss" ever have occurred in
>> an undoubled form?
>
>I think pishpish and pish are not connected. "pishpish" is derived from the
>French expression to call / lure a cat from somewhere (like sayings are very
>widespread: the comparable German expression would be "mietzmietz"
>['mi:tsmi:ts]).  "pish" is from "fish" of course. Maybe you find a similar
word
>for chicken somewhere, the one domestic animal to have surely had a special
>call.

I of course didn't mean that they _were_ connected, except insofar as being
partial homonyms.  I was only meaning that with the doubling of the
syllable, the meaning would necessarily be construed entirely differently.
I'd always heard puss-puss and hyas puss-puss up here, by the way, rather
than pish-pish (even though that's what's in Anderson).......


>> As far as the Chinook-English alphabetical thing goes; I'm going through my
>> Shaw-based English-Chinook pages and reversing everything, then pulling a
>> massive "sort" (in Word); then I'll add in all the stuff from my other
>> pages, including the Kamloops Wawa, Jacobs, Anderson, and other lists and
>> anything else around.  Then ONE BIG SORT, and hopefully I'll be able to
>> make it easily searchable.....I'll try and include the Grande Ronde
>> spellings eventually, as well as the ASCII renderings.......Gawd, what a
>> lot of work!
>
>Maybe you should try the really handy freeware SHOEBOX (from SIL, though
...),
>a linguist's analysis suite I would call it, with wich you can define your
own
>sort orders (say L after l and X after H or something) and you can build up
>databases and concordances from any thinkable kind of text plus you can
analyze
>text, break it down into morphemes and build lexicon from the original text.
>And the good thing: all datafiles are crisp and clean ANSI-code, processable
>anywhere.

Sounds handy......