mystery "French" in Wawa

[Anthony Grant]

What Isaac says confirms what I've found in Canadian French.  i think
the fact that Frenc has different names for different kinds of beans may
also have something to do with the adoption of the English term as a
kind of hyperonym; what Americans think of as 'beans' (as in pork and
beans) is a plant closer to feve than to haricot.  /bins/ was also
elicited in Siuslaw as the wor5ds for 'beans' from Mae Barrett Elliott
by Morris Swadesh and Robert melton during the Penutian Vocabulary
Survey in 1953 and the chuckle on the tape shows that she was amused
that Siuslaw used an English word for this.

Incidentally /bins/ is also used as the word for beans in Pearl Lagoon
Basin Miskitu, where it has completely supplanted the original word
/snek/ which wa sborrowed form an eastern Mayan language.

Anthony

>>> "Isaac M. Davis" <isaacmacdonalddavis at GMAIL.COM> 06/12/08 5:26 am
>>>
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
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> the sender of a message, click 'REPLY'.  Hayu masi!
>



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