More Pain

[Koontz John E]

I have a French military dictionary.  I looked in it and found several
pain forms that seem to amount to ingot or bar or metal, e.g., pain
d'acier (steel), pain de cuivre (copper).  Sort of like sugarloaf in
English.  I think someone mentioned sugarloaf.  I suppose paincourt could
also mean an underweight ingot, or perhaps, by extension, it could be a
reference to underpaying or shortchanging or cheating someone.  The same
could be true of a form meaning 'short loaf (of bread)'.  This would not
be as popular an explanation with the city fathers, of course, but might
be just as plausible in reference to a market town.  I don't recall any
parallel cases off hand.

I've given a little thought as to what sorts of native names might lead to
pain cour(t).  The best I can come up with are Peoria (Pewarewa) and
Piankashaw (peangis^ia).  The French truncation of the former was Pe(z).
The main Illinois village in the vincinity was Cahokia, on the east bank,
which gives its name spuriously to the archaeological sites near St.
Louis.  The Peoria were on the east bank somewhat to the north with the
Cahokia from 1763 to 1766, which is just at the foundation of St. Louis,
and they were around St. Louis on both banks in the 1760s generally.
Until 1763 they were on the upper reaches of the Illinois near Lake
Peoria.  About this time they absorbed the Cahokia and Peoria came to be
one of the main terms for the Illinois.  In contrast the Kaskaskia and
Michigamea were near Ft. Chartres and Ste. Genevieve.

Pe is obviously a fairly good match for Pain (piN, peN), but unnasalized,
and I can't get to Paincour(t) from there except by the unprincipled
approach of claiming an alliterative word play.  Not that we don't seem
have evidence that such things exist, and that's the proposal I've offered
for getting from Pain court to PpahiN z^ide.

John E. Koontz
http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz