Canadian French 'le sleigh'?

[David Robertson]

Howdy, 

Are any Canadian French varieties known to say 'le sleigh' instead of 'le 
traineau'?

I ask because of the following, found in a letter from a Shhkaltkmah 
(Shuswap) man...given with word-by-word glosses and a translation:

Naika ayu koli kopa lasli alta okuk san 
I MUCH GO ON SLEIGH NOW THIS DAY
"I was traveling around by sleigh just now today,"

pi naika klatwa kopa stishon 
AND I GO TO STATION
"and I went to the train station,"

pi naika tlap maika pipa.
AND I GET YOU LETTER
"and I received your letter."

First off, I could be misunderstanding the word "lasli".  But the letter 
was written in early February, so sleighs come to mind.  They're mentioned 
a number of times in the shorthand Chinook Jargon: people took sleigh rides 
on the frozen rivers, etc.  

If this word is "le sleigh" (could be "la"--you can't tell from the 
shorthand), I'd imagine it's a Canadianism.  Standard French has "le 
traineau" according to my dictionary.  

I assume this writer was ethnically a Shuswap.  His address was 
Shhkaltkmah, a Shuswap village.  The mere fact that he was a frequent 
correspondent of Father Le Jeune's suggests he was active in the village 
government (Catholic version, not traditional version).  

I would imagine "le sleigh" to be Metis French since there were Metis 
families at Kamloops since the early 19th century, connected with the fur 
trade.  I understand there were Metis French speakers there well into the 
20th century.  

A less likely origin would be general Canadian French.  I have a hard time 
picturing reasons for this letter writer to have had much interaction with 
francophones from back East.

Even less likely is that the European francophone priests like Le Jeune 
incorporated English "sleigh" into their own French--and from there into 
Chinook Jargon.  

So, on the basis of this one word, I seem to be leaning toward the idea 
that local Metis French had some interaction with Chinook Jargon, and left 
its mark on local CJ.  If you have access to Kuipers' work on Shuswap, look 
for the French-based words in that language.  You'll see that a big 
proportion of them came neither from CJ nor from missionaries' 
European/standard French.  Presumably Metis French is the source.  

There's an interesting distribution of Metis French in the Pacific 
Northwest, which you can trace partly by examining the local languages.  
For example, Spokane-Kalispel-Montana Salish, and Carrier, have plenty of 
MF words.  (Christine Mullen in 1976 wrote a UVic MA thesis on these words 
in Spokane.)  These are languages spoken at the fringe of CJ's main range, 
so most "French" words are MF there.  The job of distinguishing MF loans 
from CJ's "French" words & the missionaries' standard French words gets 
harder in those languages spoken where CJ-using European Catholic 
missionaries worked, like Thompson, Okanagan, etc.  But the evidence is 
still there.  

There is a recurring pattern in the Northwest, of one contact-induced 
variety feeding into the creation of another.  Nootka Jargon, Metis French, 
and colonial (koine) English all went into the creation of CJ as we know 
it.  And Metis French may have been an influence on the development of 
Kamloops-area CJ into the unique variety that it was.

--Dave R.

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