few more French etymological possibilities

[Mike Cleven]

"janilta at j.email.ne.jp" wrote:
>
> Mike,
>
> Even if I do agree with the comments about 'habillement, accoutrement,
> harnachement', it does not seem to match the sounds of 'lepishemo', does
> it ? (no SH sound at all).

I misread his phonetics - 'j' is a 'y', right - but even with that, are
there any instances of French dialects where y -> j as is often the case
in Spanish?  Again, this is Canadian French, on the far frontier, spoken
by native or half-native people, that we're talking about.

Did you see "Last of the Mohicans"? there's a speech in French by one of
the native chiefs (about to burn the British officer) in a heavy
Algonkian accent; that's the sort of distortion of typical French
prononciation I'm thinking about, rather than any strict and purely
French form in Quebec or Europe.

>
> For 'la pelle à feu' being origin of 'lapellah', it is the question of
> 'fire shovel' being able or not to represent the idea of fire/fire place
> I think.

I know that one's a reach; but to me "le foyer" and "le feu" are as
well, which are what Shaw had guessed; myself I thought just "la pelle"
by itself, just because of the phonetic similarity and the wild guess
that a shovel may have been a voyageur's favourite meat-cooking
implement (the lapoel - la poelle - frying pan - not being large
enough?).  But when Jacques came up with the above it struck me that the
adaption might spin off of that phrase, but dropping the final word for
some reason; otherwise "lapellopoo" would be the result.  OK, OK, like I
said it's a reach - but I still don't think anyone's come up with an
actual etymology from any language for lapellah; and all the usual
historical sources say it's supposed to be French by origin.  Unless
someone can explain to me how "-oy-" becomes "-ell-", and why the final
vowel isn't "-ay" instead of "-ah" (which seems to have the 'h' guttural
on the end of it, which the silent 'r' in '-er' wouldn't mutate to IMO)

One useful thing that Jacques came up with is vis a vis Delate/dret.
"Droit", as you know, doesn't have the same vowel at all; Jacques
pointed out that "dret" and "drette" are the Norman versions of this
word, and of course canadien dialects are mostly Norman by origin; I
know I've heard it among my saguenard and outouais friends up in
Whistler.  It's interesting that "dret" is used exactly as such in Grand
Ronde; seems the r -> l thing doesn't necessarily have to apply when
words join the Jargon.

--
Mike Cleven
http://www.cayoosh.net (Bridge River Lillooet history)
http://www.hiyu.net (Chinook Jargon phrasebook/history)