Montler on plurals of Saanich CJ loans

[David Robertson]

Online you can view the entire contents of Tim Montler's excellent book on
the phonology and morphology of Saanich Salish.  There, I noticed this
footnote (one spelling changed so you could view the characters):

"9. The absence of a plural marking for /lEmEtu/ may have something to do
with the fact that `sheep' in English has a zero plural. The word for
`angel' may represent a borrowing of a French plural, "les anges", and so
is not needed to be pluralized again. But see example 107 above where
`apples', a plural form borrowed into Saanich from English can be further
pluralized."

An argument that I might make to explain why CJ loans into Saanich don't
get pluralized is:  Maybe lots of Saanich people knew CJ.  If so, maybe
they knew it's not proper to pluralize CJ nouns.  The words for 'sheep'
and 'angel(s)' both come from CJ.

A similar argument would be:  When Saanich speakers heard CJ, they heard
the words in their usual unchanging forms.  (You don't add anything to a
CJ word to pluralize it.)  So these words were taken in their unvarying,
usually encountered forms into Saanich.  In the same way, the English
word 'apples' could easily have been the most usually heard form of that
noun (when Saanich speakers heard English beginning in the 1800s), so it
was this plural form that got borrowed into Saanich, not the singular.

Either way, I think we don't need to appeal to facts of English or French
grammar to explain these plurals in Saanich.  We only need to be aware of
Chinook Jargon.

--Dave R.