St. Louis?

[Michael Mccafferty]

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:

>
>
>
>
> > 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"
>
No. Definitely not. "Pain court" has no semantic relationship with "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?
>

No, again, again.

Michael




> 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
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