Berdache etymology revisited; Japanese Web browsers?

[Jeffrey Kopp]

Klahowya, sikhs.  I received a cheery email today from a
correspondent in Japan who is studying "American Jargons," including
Metis and French-Cree.  She (he?) mentioned that several words appear
in the Jargon or persist in Canadian dialect despite having
disappeared from French in France, and then inquired about the
baffling word berdache.

A few days ago while cruising DejaNews I ran across a Usenet exchange
from last April in alt.native where Mike posed this very question,
and this fascinating explanation was offered:

>Subject: Re: Berdache
>Date: 1999/04/19
>Author: HispanApch <hispanapch at aol.comSpAmLeSs>
>
>Berdache originally came from from the Persian "bardaj", 
>and via the Arabs spread to the Italian language as "bardasso" 
>and to Spanish as "bardaxa" or  "bardaje" by the beginning 
>of the 16th century. About the same time the word appeared 
>in French as "bardache".
>- "The Spirit and the Flesh" by Walter L. Williams (page 9) 

Please excuse me if Mike has already passed this to us, but I didn't
find it in my archived posts.  But I do seem to have seen it before
somewhere.  (I guess that's why they call it DejaNews.)  Anyway, I
passed it along in reply myself, but couldn't vouch for the reply as
I savvy nil about French and nearly nada about Spanish.

Funny how this "word of very limited use" attracts so much attention
in the Jargon.  (At least no one has tried to suggest that the
pejorative "swish" is derived from "siwash.")  (Yet.) (Joke!!)

In a very tangentially related vein, my inquirer also noted some
confusion of article gender in the French-origin words and frankly
(no pun intended--sorry!!) I hadn't yet noticed.  I presume that
Gibbs and Shaw might have made some mistakes here as they may not
have spoken French, and the native pronunciation of European words in
the Jargon was of course only quite approximate due to the great
difference in sound systems employed in their languages.  Anyway, a
hasty check of Demers and LeJeune showed they gendered the examples
given correctly.  I presumed these guys did speak French from their
names and occupation, but then upon composing my reply I realized I
wasn't altogether sure (nor do I know that Gibbs and Shaw didn't).

I invited our new correspondent to join us on the list.

The last point brought up was that the dictionaries did not display
or print properly in a Web browser set up for Japanese.  This is a
circumstance I had not really anticipated.  Well, I did actually
briefly consider it, but then recklessly presumed only people in
English-speaking countries would be looking in on the Chinook Jargon!


Anyway, the problem dictionary was not specified, but I am pretty
sure it was Gibbs or Shaw because they are set in HTML and the others
are all images.  If any of you should happen to be set up for a
non-English (or especially non-Roman character set) language out
there, I would sure appreciate hearing back how they look, especially
the quote marks and double dashes.  If those are the only problems, I
can fix them by reverting to ordinary double quotes (instead of the
cute, curly kind) and my old hat trick of struck-through pairs of
hard spaces for a double dash.

Thanks all!

(LeJeune's works, beginning with the 1924 Chinook Rudiments, are
coming along, as soon as I get a little more caught up again.)

Regards,

Jeff