Another loan word (place name) in Thompson Salish

[David D. Robertson]

The Thompson River Salish dictionary has /pucin/ with final stress.  It
means the BC town of 'Yale / Port Yale / Fort Yale.'  The source is given
as [Upriver] Halkomelem Salish, the Thompsons' neighbors to the
West, "probaby from English."  There's an interesting story in this word
for sure.  Here is how I reconstruct it:

I presume this started life as "Fort Yale" in English.  When pronounced
during earlier times by local Native people whose dominant language was
Halkomelem, it must have been reshaped into something like /puchil/,
the /ch/ sound in the middle arising the same way it does when I
say "doncha" for "don't you."  (Note, lots of times English "o" and "long
a" sounds were reinterpreted as /u/ and /i/ in the Northwest.)

This form would've been identical to how the same speakers would say "Port
Yale," if that were the name of the town, because their language
lacked /f/.  I'll come back to this below.

/puchil/ would have been the place name heard by Thompson people, who knew
that Halkomelem speakers usually say /l/ instead of /n/, so the Thompsons
kindly "corrected" the pronunciation to /puchin/.

/puchin/ is just how Thompson speakers would pronounce a word /pucin/ if
they had one; well, now they did!  I speculate they went a step further in
nativizing this word, because the end of it, /-cin/, is exactly identical
to the Salish suffix /-cin/ having meanings like 'mouth, point, tip.'
(For example, the mouth of a river, or a stretch of land by a river or
lake.)

Now the word was several steps removed from any particular English
source.  English was pretty widespread by about 150 years ago in that
region; it must have been obvious to Native people, as they came to know
English, that the name of this non-Indian town was likely also not
Indian.  There may have been a period when people were becoming used to
saying things in English and sometimes overcompensated, turning a word
like /pucin/ or /puchil/ back into English, sometimes coming up with "Port
Yale," sometimes "Fort Yale."

There's similar variation between "Fort..." and "Port..." in a number of
place names along the Northwest Coast.  A similar history of linguistic
contact may be a big reason for this.  It's not a bad idea for a study!

--Dave R.