St. Louis - Pain Court

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, [windows-1252] "Alfred W. Tüting" wrote:
>  > Paroisse de l?Immaculée Conception de Pain Court
>
> C?est la misère extrême des ancêtres qui a donné le jour au nom de Pain
> Court. Les missionnaires disaient : « Je m?en vais dans la mission du
> pain court », ou tout simplement : « Je m?en vais à Pain Court. » Et le
> nom prit racine pour toujours... <<
>
> It seems that the French speaking author doesn't have problems to quote
> the term _pain court_ in the sense of smth like "short of bread"
> (although it doesn't look like a real grammatical French rendering,
> then).

Comments on St. Louis as "Pain court" generally pair this with a comment
on Ste. Genevieve as "Misere," suggesting a parallel.  It would be
interesting to know what the first source is that suggests this.  I agree
that taking something like "a short loaf" as symbolic of want or perhaps
just meagerness seems more consistent with French syntax than other
possibilities.

In any event, any explanation of the name as applied to St. Louis has to
account for its use in three North American placenames dating to French
settlements in the area, and probably also to its use in two street names
in France.  It seems clear that some metaphorical meaning might be
involved.

It is also possible that the name might reflect the French nickname or dit
name of an early resident, though it seems more likely that Paincort as a
nickname reflects the same metaphor as the placenames than that the
placenames derive from the nickname.  This seems likely because of the
number of instances of Paincourt as a placename and the tendency to
explain it in ways that imply shortages of food rather than as a nickname.

Finally, if the sense is taken simply as short bread without too much
emphasis on what that might mean, it could represent a none-too-relevant
play on an unrelated phrase in another language with a similar sound.
This seems less likely because the name does reappear as a placename, and
because Native American versions of St. Louis seem to be derived from the
French and not vice versa.  If we include Allan Taylor's Gros Ventre case,
the Native American versions include not just borrowings of the sound
sequence by calques of the sense.

On the other hand, the Omaha(-Ponca) name might well involve a play on
pain [peN].  Something like [peN] might well suggest an underlying
ppahi(N) to an Omaha-Ponca speaker, since h tends to be lost in the
context V'hV and since ai contracts to e.  This is basically Rory's
suggestion, of course.  This might then lead to various wordplays that
would accomodate that sequence, even if they had meanings that were
unrelated to the original, but relevant somehow to the context in a
humorous way.  If Omaha-Ponca speakers were in the habit of referring to
St. Louis as Ppe ~ Ppa(h)i(N), rendering Pain(court), they might easily
interpret this as 'Headhair, Scalp' or 'Neck' at the first stage, and then
adapt this first to ppahi(N) z^ide 'red hair' explained as a reference to
Clark and later reexplain even that as 'red neck', even if the word for
'hair' or 'neck' weren't quite right.  The 'redneck' explanation probably
dates to the 1900s, or subsequent to whenever the term redneck became
common.  Some of the same forms might apply in other Siouan languages in
the area, and so Rory is quite right to ask after these.

It occurs to me that personal names such as "Batchi" [bac^hi?] for Sarpy
and "Jo" for Joseph LaFlesche has some similar potential.  The potential
here is along the lines of the ethnonym Jew in Winnebago or the word for
'turkey' in various Muskogean languages, both of which are explicitly
attested elsewhere.