Ketlings pe itkas kapa tenas muckamuck haws - kettles andthingsfor a kitchen

[Mike Cleven]

janilta wrote:
>
> Hello, Mike,
>
> Stove/oven would be 'le poele' in that case, that is the iron thing you
> described. La chauffe is not possible I think since it does not bear the
> same meaning.
>
> Yann.

Thanks Yann.  I was trying to figure that out; I just dragged out my old
Pocket Larousse, magically reappeared after being swallowed in the
jumble of my unsorted shelves and found the following.  I was thinking
of heat, but knew that the root also made words like chauffeur (the
pre-automobile meaning of which was stoker or (train) fireman; someone
who makes the engine go.  I know I've heard the term "la chauffe"
(heating, overheating, stoking, firing) used by my skieur friends at
Whistler (whom I lived with for years) to refer to the household
woodstove - which mind you was indeed the heating for the house
(no'cabane; their no^tre typically no', and yes it really was a log
cabin of the oldest and chilliest kind!).  But my French wasn't so great
then (still isn't; I can read and compose much better than apprehend
spoken speech - _especially_ rapid-fire canadien) so maybe they were
talking about stoking the stove, rather than the stove itself; my sense
was that they used "la chauffe" to refer to the stove per se, but even
if they -were- referring to the task of feeding it, my misapprehension
of that meaning - and misapplication, by my suggestion that lashowf
could be a Jargon word for stove - underscores the way that non-speakers
of a language pick up bits of it out of context from another language;
the meaning mutates even though the loan is fairly direct; indeed, it is
from forms of speech.   A related meaning is relayed from one speech to
the other, but not the exact semantic of the word.  "Lashowf" just felt
right to me when I thought of it as a possible, and in the same way that
the meaning of "mahsh" varies from "marcher" (via marche t'en vas for
"throw" or "put it down" and then into a host of new meanings) and
"house" in Jargon (meaning room and building as well as house or home)
varies from English "house", and so forth.

Maybe it _is_ another Canadian expression that's foreign to European
French, although I don't want to keep on falling back on that; I think I
should try and find a dictionary of Canadian French for this kind of
thing, though, which I'll make a point of doing at my next bookstore as
I've been buying historical and linguistic reference stuff lately; I
should have one anyway.  I'll be up in Whistler this week so I can poll
my woodstove-owning buddies for their term for it, and I'll let you
know!

"le poele" is the French root of lapellah - roast, with mamook as an
auxiliary meaning "to roast, as over a fire" - but I don't know if
lapellah was ever used to mean "stove" or "oven" as such (Tony?).  It
seems we have an odd reversal here - the object of cooking (a stove)
becoming the act of cooking, and in the other case the act of tending a
stove (la chauffe) being taken (be me only, so far) as meaning the stove
as an object.  Hmmmmm.  Fits the pattern of French-Jargon borrowings
anyway, even if I did just make it up ;-)

This is what I mean by invented/inventive borrowings; it's not a
question of stealing words, but of adapting and mutating them to suit
the nature of the Jargon.  Dilution by substitution of non-Jargon words
wholesale is part of what killed the Jargon as a community vehicle in
the Northwest; as more and more people spoke a form of Jargon that was
heavily peppered with more and more English (and of course more and more
people knew little Jargon at all), it sooner or later (as is the way of
English, I think) became English peppered with less and less Jargon; and
when newer objects and ideas came along that had no place in the lives
of Jargon speakers (native or non-native) then new words were not
adopted or adapted to describe them; the cultural divide between the
majority of surviving Jargon speakers in the 20th Century (after the
Great War overwhelmingly native, but not before) had to do with
everything from technology to education to opportunity etc. etc.; the
Jargon-speaking community had no intelligentsia or elites (although many
of the Northwest elites indeed spoke it until 1910 or so) to cultivate a
broader vocabulary or flesh out the rather considerable (I think)
potential of Jargon literature.  Particularly aphorisms, I think, even
more than poetry or story-telling; although come to think of it a hyas
yiem storytelling theatre in the Jargon would be kinda cool (any
takers?), telling fables from around the world, staged, in the Jargon.
Could be a hit in Tokyo....by the way anyone wanna come up with a
"house" compound for "theatre" as a building, and also for theatre as an
activity or art.  The point is that the act of "making" a language is
also the act of making a culture and a worldview, the language being the
definition as well as the vehicle of concept and communication.   If we
all make a point of using the Jargon with each other regularly, we'll
each develop our own ways of thinking and speaking in it, and as a
community a collective syntax will emerge that will broaden on the base
of the historic Jargon and the Grand Ronde Jargon -if- we want it to,
and help it happen.

So about loan words - grab roots, simplify terms, even mis-take them
when suitable; find words that _ring_ well, no matter what speech they
come from or how they may have twisted in the change from one tongue to
another.  The Jargon is FULL of such words; let's make some
more......from whatever language!  Who knows, maybe Yann might come up
with a Catalan expression that would work for something sometime.  And
in some cases, geez, it's just -gotta- be a loan word.  How else do you
want to say "sushi" in the Jargon.  "Cole pish"?  Yuck.

Hmmmm.  Here's one, dragged straight in from Canadian French - "lasonsa"
for escalator (from canadien-franc,ais "l'ascenseur"; escaliers mobiles
in France IIRC).  Didn't twist it at all although a Jargonization of the
French term would be like lapellah - the '-eur' umlauty thing on the end
just neutralizing to '-ah' like the final 'e' in 'poele'.  Maybe
"lasonsoo" is closer to the original, though; looks more Jargony a bit,
too.

I think, btw, that "truck" is probably worth importing, and is indeed
the kind of word that a Cariboo or Okanagan ranchhand would have used in
his Jargon.  "Hyas truck" would be a semi (lorry to you off-worlders),
and maybe "stick truck" for a logging truck.  One of my favourite bits
of canadien joual ("play-language", quebecois/franglais slang) is
"backez le truck".  The Jargon equivalent, of course, would be "Kimtah
truck!" or maybe "Kilapi truck" (depending on what's going on).  Might
propose that the borrowing (if you guys like it) take the quebecois
prononciation of "truck" - 'eu' sort of - rather than the English -
'uh'; more flavour, and makes it less direct from English ;-)

Might suggest that if we need words for specific things that might occur
in other Jargons and creoles, we adopt _their_ words as suitable.  I'm
not sure how much of the old Basque Pidgin of the St. Lawrence has been
recorded, or Mobilian.  We might also consider the cultures and peoples
who also came to the Northwest whose presence in the Jargon seems
invisible - the Russians, Spanish, Chinese, Kanakas, West Indians (with
various creoles), Portuguese, Filipinos, etc. as well as the many
regional languages whose role in the Jargon was minor in comparison to
Chinook, Nootka and Chehalis; if there's ever a useful and/or suitable
and easy-to-adapt Klickitat or Kalapuya or Klamath word that occurs to
one of you guys down that way, _please_ suggest it.  I'm all for signing
up the St'at'imcets "ha'kwa7" (I think that's how its
spelled/pronounced; it means a particular kind of leafy wild green;
called Indian Rhubarb in local English up there) to mean "lettuce" or
any leafy edible of that sort.  I guess a Jargonization of the
St'at'imcets would be hakwa or ha-kwah; in St'at'imcets the latter 'a'
is rather 'flat', not like the sound that 'ah' usually represents.

Pondering this, it's just occurred to me that I might investigate family
historians within the Chinese community here; several books have been
published of prominent frontier-era Canadian Chinese families; some of
those men surely spoke the Jargon, and I'm wondering if there's anything
written in their journals - in -Chinese- describing the Jargon or giving
phrases in it.  Hmmmmmmmm.  Many of these men _were_ literature,
especially the guys who came over before the railway era (merchants,
service people like cleaners, butlers, tailors, etc.).
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (Barbara - who do you know?????)

Mike
http://members.home.net/skookum/