mystery "French" in Wawa

[jlarmagost]

Henry,

I don't know about Canadian French, but French French 'the teeth' is spelled
<les dents>, pronounced [le daN] //<aN> for nasalized-n//, and 'the
dandelions' is <les dents-de-lion>, [le daNd(e)ljoN] //<(e)> for schwa, <j>
for palatal glide, <oN> for nasalized-o. At an earlier stage, I think, the
[aN] here was pronounced [eN], i.e. nasalised-epsilon, and way back the
final consonants were pronounced too. I wonder if Canadian Fr. preserves
such a pronunciation?

Fr. French 'the frying pan' is spelled <la poEl(e)> --<E> for circumflex-e,
<(e)> for schwa--, pronounced [la pwal]. Latin /i/ --> French /e/ --> /wa/,
as in this other example: L. <pilus> --> Fr. <poil> pronounced [pwal]
'(animal) hair', with Spanish <pelo> 'hair' preserving the intermediate
stage.

I can't come up with beans for 'beans'!!

Jim


jlarmagost at verizon.net

-----Original Message-----
From: hzenk at pdx.edu [mailto:hzenk at pdx.edu]
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2008 3:05 PM
To: The Chinook Studies List; jlarmagost
Cc: CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Subject: mystery "French" in Wawa


I was wondering whether anyone out on the list has a clue about the
following three words, all collected as Wawa by John P. Harrington on
the lower Columbia and Oregon Coast in 1942 (these are from the
Harrington Papers, mf rolls 17 and 18):

lident 'dandelion' (given by Louis Fuller, who also spoke Salmon R
Tillamook).

labins 'beans' (also Louis Fuller).

lapeyl 'can (for cooking in)' (Joe Peter, a Cowlitz living at Yakima Res).


All three words appear to have French articles, but I don't find
anything like them in my French dictionary.  Are they Canadianisms?
Local coinings?  (Since so many nouns for introduced items are from
French, there may be a tendency to adopt the French article as a sort
of noun-classifier for such words).  Henry

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