coulee etc.

[Mike Cleven]

Ack - that was YOU who posted the info about sound changes in
Prairie/Metis French.  Here's your post again, which would account for
the coule'e transference into English directly from Metis/Prairie
French, instead of having to have the English borrowers change the
vowel, which I suppose was the only other possibility.....

janilta wrote:
>
> David, Mike, Chris,
>
> Yes, 'coulee' is clearly a French noun and, as was already mentioned,
> describe, as a general term, the 'path' carved by a river more than its
> flow itself. No Metis word here.
> And I don't think that its use is different in Canada/America from the
> European use, in spite of the fact that the rivers are sometimes bigger
> there probably.
>
> Btw, Mike, can you give me the date of the first mention of Oregon (or
> any other of its various forms) since the date of entry of '(h)ouragan'
> in French language has been quite precisely determined, so that we may
> see if the connection is chronologically possible.
>
> The phnological system of the Mitchif (Metis/'Prairie French') can give
> an explanation for some CJ words I guess. Patrick Douaud in 'Mitchif, un
> aspect de la francophonie' explains that 'Fr 's' becomes 'ch' (ie Eng
> 'sh') and Fr 'z' becones 'j' (not Eng 'j' !), especially in initial
> position, so that we have 'les sauvages' pronounced as 'li chavage'
> (thus quite close to CJ !).... the changing of 'e' and 'o' vowels in f
> ex final position respectively becoming 'i' (Eng 'ee') and 'u' (Eng
> 'oo') eg Fr 'ble' is 'bli' and Fr 'gros' is 'grou' ('groo').
> So I think this can explain partly our 'cooley' riddle. 'Courez' becames
> 'couri' and the rolled 'r' was noted 'l'.
> And there was no construction of any Mitchif verb as 'couri' I think,
> especially if one takes into account that in Mitchif the nouns are
> French (less than 1% Cree) but the verbs Cree (less than 1% French). No
> Mitchif verb here.
>
> For historical, chronological, geographical and ethnical reasons, I do
> believe the 'coolie' thing must be a kind of a joke... ;-)
>
> Regards, Yann.