coulee/cooley... R and L !!!

[Mike Cleven]

janilta wrote:
>
> Mike,
>
> Yes, you're right, 'ez' in 'courez !' should obviously be written with
> 'ay', not 'ey'... So if we have 'cooley', the only French word close to
> these sounds is the culinary 'coulis' not relevant here !
> Yes, 'mahsh' can be the singular imperative form 'marche !' but 'couley'
> would have been the plural imperative form 'courez !'.
> So we have some conjugaison though... ;-)
> But it seems quite impossible to be affirmative here too...

I'm not sure about that; this is why I mentioned the Metis voyageurs,
who after all are the primary source of French loanwords, followed
closely by the priests.  I don't know enough about Prairie and Metis
French to be sure of it, but cooley could well be from a dialect form of
the imperative - couli(z), perhaps.

Another thought had about this long ago is that cooley was some kind of
borrowing from English,such that the use of "coolie" for labourer was
misunderstood to mean "work harder", "do it faster", etc.  This seems
improbable but not beyond reach, given the curious history of "mahsh"
and other words; in which case the Jargon has in it a Hindi word.....
(kuli = slave, worker)