"Lent" before Easter, in CW & Thompson

[David Robertson]

Since there's no Salish listserv anymore, and this same word was used in
Chinuk Wawa by the same ethnic group, I'll put a note here.

In Thompson (Salish) of southern interior BC, there's a verb root (as
listed by Thompson & Thompson in their 1996 dictionary) kele-.  It's said
to mean approximately "to do without something".  It's described as usually
occurring with the Middle suffix, -m.

So the word is usually kelem.

This has to be from the French word for "Lent", the 40 days preceding
Easter.  (The French word, careme, in turn comes from a Latin term based on
the word for "forty".)  The francophone missionary priests itnroduced their
own word for Lent into Chinuk Wawa, so you'll generally see the word (as
likarim/likalim) in Kamloops Wawa.  KW may have been the immediate source
for the Thompson word.  Thompson speakers seem to have felt it sounded like
some root + Middle, therefore giving a new root form kele-.

At least two other Thompson words seem to me to have possible French or
French-via-CW origins: kalil (I can't find this in the 1996 dictionary but
I've seen Le Jeune use it & refer to it as a Thompson word) for (some)
sickness could be from "colere".  And mlam for marriage is probably an
extension of the ancient root mla- referring to treatment by a medicine
man, + Middle, under the influence of the CW word mali/malye + a feeling
that medicine men and priests were equivalent.  In this regard, maybe it's
just coincidental that Le Jeune of Kamloops Wawa was widely known to keep a
big stock of medicines in his house for treating Indians!

--Dave

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