Palmer ’s and Winthrop's Word Lists

[Francisc Czobor]

KLA-HI-YOU ! (Palmer-style...)

 

Thank you, Isaac. I also suspected that Krappo could be of French origin, but I didn’t have a good French dictionary at hand, just a pocket dictionary, where the word “crapaud” was missing. Only afte sending my previous message I found a better dictionary, and found out that in French “toad” is “crapaud”.

 

Now, why these French words, I mean “Krappo” and “Lesitwell”, appear only in this single source, Palmer’s glossary?

 

For “stars”, the usual CW word is tsil-tsil (whith the variants chil-chil and sil-sil, for those uanble to pronounce the [ts] sound), which means also “buttons”.

 

Regarding “toad”, I didn’t find a CW for it in any other source. The CW word shwakek (alias shwahkuk, shwakuk, shwakook, skwahkuk, swahkuk, swakek, wakik) means in all sources just “frog”, it doesn’t cover also the meaning “toad”.

 

It is hard to believe that these two words, Krappo and Lesitwell, were invented by Palmer himself. But why don’t they appear in other dictionaries or glossaries? Were they omitted by other authors, or they were local words, used only in the area where Palmer collected these words; this should been an area with a stronger French influence
 or maybe Palmer collected this word-list from some CW-speaking French Canadian?? In any case, “lesitwell” for “les étoiles” reflects the Canadian French (= old French) pronounciation, where the diftong “oi” is pronounced [we], not [wa] as in normal French, like in laswey for “la soie”, or lawen for “l’avoine”.

 

Francisc

 


Isaac Davis <embryomystic at COGECO.CA> wrote:> What is interesting to this word list is that it differs
> considerably from the other CJ dictionaries and
> vocabularies, in spelling as well as in content. Some
> examples:
>
> Krappo “toad”
>
Clearly from the French 'crapaud' (which is also, puzzlingly, the name of a small town on Prince Edward Island).


Isaac M. Davis

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