Jewitt etc [addendum]

[David Robertson]

Silly me, I'm getting into a habit of forgetting part of each message that
I intend to send out...

Call this a kimtah-tzum (a P.S.):  Methinks that "pasiooks"/ "pasayuks"
was used equally well for the voyageurs of Me'tis extraction as for
Frenchmen per se.

In fact, a majority of French speakers in the NW would likely always have
been Me'tis.  Among the rest, most were missionary priests, hein?

Now let's note that "pasayuks" is, as someone just recently mentioned
here, a combination of the word "franc,ais"* with the Old / Lower Chinook
suffix for animate plural beings.  This alone very strongly suggests that
the term originated among the Lower Chinooks themselves, i.e. about the
mouth of the Columbia River.  In that particular geographic context, the
"maritime" as opposed to the "overland" trade, it would have been a label
for men from France.    But as the Jargon spread to new regions as a
lingua franca (get it?)  :-) it's easy to suppose that this term applied
to any who spoke French..  May I propose further that it was probably quite
easy to spot a francophone:  He was probably in black robes or a furtrader
married to a native woman.  You wouldn't have needed to know word one of
the language to label 'em as such.

(*I reject fairly firmly the suggestion that "pasayuks" is derived from
"pasisse" i.e. "cloth".)

In such a scenario, identity as an "Eastern Indian" might well have been
submerged to that as "French".

To leave you with a fun anecdote, I refer to L.V. McWhorter's collections
of Indian stories, particularly those about the Stick Indians or
stick-showers (i.e. those who show, or poke, sticks at you) which some
whites appear to call Sasquatch.  LVMcW records a ?Yakama man saying in a
Pidgin English, which is another fascinating subject entirely,
something like "Him bad stick-shower ... Him not like citizen
stick-shower!"  Had this man been speaking CJ, he might have used the
phrase "Boston stik sawash" in this sentence.   Does anyone else here
detect humor based on the idea that Stick Indians are unassimilated
tribes?  This is from memory, so help me out if I'm shaky, please.

Best wishes, friends,
Dave

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