mystery "French" in Wawa

[Isaac M. Davis]

I may be able to shed a little light here.

In Québec French, <en> is indeed often pronounced as a nasalised epsilon (I
should know; I hear it every day). I don't know if this is an archaism that
may be shared with more westerly dialects and accents, but it's certainly
possible.

As well, 'des binnes' for 'beans' is an extremely common Anglicism. It's
about coequal with 'des fèves' in restaurant menus. I tend to say the latter
at my own food service job, but that's just out of habit and the L2
speaker's tendency to avoid obvious loanwords from one's own L1.


Isaac

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 2:05 AM, jlarmagost <jlarmagost at verizon.net> wrote:

> 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
>
> To respond to the CHINOOK list, click 'REPLY ALL'.  To respond privately to
> the sender of a message, click 'REPLY'.  Hayu masi!
>



-- 

"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master."
—Abraham Lincoln
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