St. Louis?

[Rory M Larson]

> Could pain have been pronounced /paiN/ then, or would it
> be clearly /peN:/ ?  If the former, it should be easy
> for an Omaha speaker to reinterpret it as pahiN' or
> pa'hi.
>
> The second part throws me though.  I don't see how to
> get from Fr. court, 'short', to OP z^i'de, 'red', either
> by reinterpretation of the sound sequence or by calquing.
> Is there any possibility that the 't' in court would have
> been pronounced back then?

Well here's an outside possibility!  There is an entry in
Francis La Flesche's Osage dictionary:

    zhiN'da, it was not.

I've never run across this in OP, and there doesn't seem
to be any elaboration on it in the Osage dictionary either.

So my highly dubious speculation is:

     Fr. pain court      "short (of?) bread"

  => Os. paiN zhiNda     "the bread was not"

  => OP  pa'hi zhi'de    "red neck"
         pahiN' zhide    "red hair"

the latter interpretation coming into vogue with Governor Clark.

This speculation depends on favorable answers to three questions:

1. Is the folk interpretation, pain court = "short of bread",
   really possible in French?

2. What was the actual meaning and use of Os. zhiNda ?

3. Did the Osage borrow Fr. pain as /paiN/ to mean bread?
   In OP, all things bread, dough and wheat are covered by
   wamuske.  In the Osage dictionary, I see this word used
   only once, in reference to a wheat field.  I don't see
   any reference to "bread" in the dictionary, which might
   suggest that it was a loan word ignored by La Flesche.

Rory