Tapahote! Hilu mayka shim!
My friend George Lang’s book “Making Wawa” (UBC Press, 2008) presents the exciting contribution of a previously unknown early Jargon manuscript.
Pages 78-80 are photos of the “Ms. 195” wordlist, tentatively attributed to the Fort Vancouver schoolmaster John Ball and dated around 1831. Read George’s book for the full story! I’m going to focus on just one word:
TAPAHOTE
It’s translated as “shame”.
You probably know the Jargon word for “shame”. Hint–it comes from English 🙂
But at this early date, there seems to have been another word for it in use. Where the heck did it come from?
Here’s my guess. Does it match yours? Metis French.
In tapahote I’m able to see (with some squinting, by which I come honestly thanks to 20/100000000 vision) the informal French expression “t’as pas honte“, an exclamation “You have no shame!” / “Shame on you!” In standard French that’s “tu n’as pas honte”.
I can’t definitively prove my etymology, but will you let me show why I think it’s a strong one?
- The “h” of “honte” is pronounced, not silent, just as we’d expect from at least certain Canadian dialects–as opposed to standard French.
- The vowel “on” is de-nasalized, exactly as we find in other Chinuk Wawa loans from French. (Think of lita from “les dents” [teeth], and lemolo from “le marron” [wild, runaway] [itself a distinctly New World form, no?].)
What’s really unusual about tapahonte is that it would be a super-rare example of a whole French clause (or sentence) becoming a single Chinuk Wawa word. I mean, Jargon has plenty of French definite article + noun units borrowed as single words, but that’s almost predictable, because those articles are never even said separately from a noun. But here we’re looking at a French subject + verb + negative + object, a much more phonologically and syntactically complex unit.
Cool!
What do you think?
You are brilliant! It appears to me that you have solved this problem. We know that Canadian French was the working language of Fort Vancouver and it obviously influenced Chinook Wawa. I was not sure about the “h” as Demers/Blanchet/St Onge did not aspirate their “h”. But I just listened to an interview of someone in Québec and they pronounced honor within aspirated “h”. I have also read that the word “mash” meaning to throw or go away comes from the French-Canadian phrase “va-t-en marche”.
While I had some difficulty finding a good online source on Canadian French dialects to link to, I can point out that a well-regarded book, Contact Languages: A Wider Perspective” (ed. Sarah Thomason) includes Peter Bakker & Bob Papen discussing on p.308 exactly this same noun “shame” in Michif, where it’s pronounced [lahu:nt] with an [h]. Let’s also remember the word “lahash” (axe) in Chinook Wawa; I’ve never found it as *[la’ash]. It’s always got the [h], cf. “en haesh” / “en hawsh” in Laverdure and Allard’s Michif dictionary.
I agree with most of the comments. “T’as pas honte!” is not standard, but that does not mean that it is not used almost everywhere in the French-speaking world: I would call it “familiar standard” (I think that too often “Standard French” is reduced to the formal, written variety, and many speech peculiarities supposed to be typically Canadian are actually familiar or conversational in Northern France – where most Québécois people came from).
Literally, “T’as pas honte!” does mean “You (singular) have no shame”, but pragmatically it is more like “Shame on you!”. It is not spoken with a declarative intonation but with an interrogative one, so it corresponds (though less formally) to English “Have you no shame?”
As for the h in “honte”, it is a Canadian survival that has practically disappeared in France although I have occasionally heard it from rural speakers in Western France years ago, as in “dehors” ‘outside’. Earlier French or Belgian missionaries, being educated, would probably not have used it in their own pronunciation, while the fur trade employees did. (But using it in “honneur” is a hypercorrection, as it would be in English “honour”).
I call the “h aspiré” “une consonne fantôme”, a ghost consonant, because if it had disappeared altogether the words containing it would behave as if starting with a vowel, thus shortening the definite article and causing a liaison with the preceding s in the plural. For instance, “la hache” ‘the axe, the hatchet’ is ‘la ache’ (not *l’ache) , and in the plural “les haches” with no liaison (no z sound in the article les), so ‘lé ache’ in pronunciation (not *’lézache’).