French element

[Francisc Czobor]

Hayash mersi, Dave!

Of course I'm happy to study Chinuk Wawa. I've been waiting more than 20 years for such an occasion and now I'm absorbing every bit of information like a thirsty man in the desert absorbing every drop of water.

My bewilderment consists in the fact that, while most of the French elements in CW are explainable as cultural loanwords, the words for body parts are not cultural terms, but basic vocabulary items, and are looking oddly in a Chinookan/Nootkan-based trade language (or pidgin, or creole, or whatever). That's why I tried to explain this by the fact that at a certain moment CW extended its domain of use from a trade language to an everyday communication language, and in this extension French-speaking people must have played an important role (for instance, non-cultural, basic-vocabulary words of Slavic origin in Romanian, a Romanic language, are explainable by the fact that in the early Middle-Age Slavs and Romanians coexisted, the former being linguistically assimilated by the later, and that these Slavic basic-vocabulary items where introduced in Romanian by bilingual Slavs).

On the other hand, this French element makes CW looking more familiar to me, who am a Frech-speaker, and also there are similar words in Romanian. For instance, beside the original Romanian "multzumesc", we use very frequently "mersi" (Frech loanword) for "thank you". Or, the CW "dret" is very similar to the Romanian "drept" (inheritend from Latin), with the same meanings as in CW.

Francisc


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