Tobacco: not just an Indian weed
Tobacco‘s but an Indian weed, said a moralistic Elizabethan song:
But it sure was popular.
Chinook Jargon had many words for it…
I want to add one to the documentation.
You’ll never guess it.
Will you?
“Tobacco”. (Found in Kamloops Wawa & the Aboriginal letters. Maybe you remember “pi iaka chu tabako“ = “and he chews tobacco”, from my post about KW #69 of 12 March 1893.)
Wait, not one word but two.
Because “tobak”. (Found for example in the Prosch 1912 dictionary ms. that I just blogged about.) Let me explain.
Samuel V. Johnson’s 1978 dissertation collected not less than 4 other words glossed as tobacco:
- k̓áynuł
- kinikinik
- bacca
- larp
- #1 is an indigenous K’alapuyan/Chinookan word; there were cultivars of native tobacco before any explorers or settlers showed up.
- #2 is an Algonquian word that became English and probably Canadian French — John Francis McDermott has it as a synonym of bois roulé in his “Glossary of Mississippi Valley French 1673-1850” — both well before contact with Pacific Northwest tribes.
- #3 is a colloquial English truncation.
- #4 is Canadian French l’herbe, the herb, brah.
You see the Jargon words for tobacco come demonstrably from at least 3 languages. Not to assign excessive importance to this point, but tobacco and tobak look really to be separate words to my eye; the first is obviously English.
The second could be just a typo’ed version of tobacco — except that we find ourselves redhanded with aromatic evidence in the form of larp and maybe kinikinik, causing a voice (surely it’s not just paranoia, is it, man?) in our heads to say:
Did you ever notice how much Canadian French there really is in Chinuk Wawa? I mean, like, if you get past the obvious ones that start with “le” and “la” that everyone always talks about?
French for tobacco is “tabac”. That’s pronounced /taba/ in modern standard/European French, which could present a problem for connecting tobak with it. I figure tobak was spelled this way by Prosch to emphasize its difference from the English word, and to show it was pronounced with a “k” at the end. Well, we’ve seen variation between pronouncing and muting final French consonants in other words of Chinook Jargon, which turned out to be explained by typical Canadian dialect usages. Examples include capot(e) pronounced as kapu in Jargon.
Because French is said to have borrowed tabac from Spanish tabaco /tabako/, and because so many other modern loans into French, such as caoutchouc, originally ended in [k] but lost it, I’m laying my bet that the original pronunciation had that [k] sound, and that CJ reflects this. One fact that backs me up is the form “le tabaque” in some older sources. (I’m trusting but verifying, by continuing to check sources such as Le parler populaire des canadiens francais.)
Tobak is tabac, and it’s CJ too. Free your mind! Expand your consciousness of Jargon lexicon! Words for this substance sprouted like weeds!
It’s not just an Indian weed, it’s everyone’s, so pass the pipe.
I discovered the years I lived in Alberta, kinnikinnik, aka bearberry, was still smoked out in the countryside. Never had any of that myself. (plant): bearberry (Arctostaphylos), red osier dogwood (Cornus sericea), silky cornel (Cornus amomum), Canadian bunchberry (Cornus canadensis), evergreen sumac (Rhus virens), littleleaf sumac (Rhus microphylla).
McDermott, citing Coues, similarly lists these favorite barks to smoke: “smooth sumac, silky cornel or dogwood or red willow, bearberry [arctostaphylos, what I know as kinnikinnick–DDR], and a species of arrowwood or viburnum”.
tobak : I agree with you. I think the lack of a final consonant in French reflects an unreleased pronunciation also existing in a few old (not borrowed) French words ending in c. The ones I remember are
broc /bro/, a type of large water pitcher
croc /kro/ ‘fang’
cric /kri/ ‘jack’ (lifting tool)
The borrowed words tabac and caoutchouc are not that old, but old enough to fit the pattern (a modern borrowing would preserve the final consonant). As for the older tabaque, it probably dates from a time when the pronunciation was still fluid. Can French in general is quite archaic.
k̓áynuł : This word looked familiar: I have been studying Kalapuyan this past year.
The archaic quality of Canadian French is helpful in cases where I’m trying to pin down the source of a Jargon term. It’s very enjoyable research! I’m pleasantly surprised how many good published reference sources are now available online. My favourite of the moment is titled “Dictionnaire de nos fautes contre la langue française” = “Catalogue of our [Canadian] sins against the French language”! 🙂
Tobak is the normal pronunciation (and spelling!) in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic and has been around (according to dialect) since the 1600’s, gaining full force in the 1800’s. (Before they said “tobacco”, they just said “smoke-stuff”).
When I saw it listed here I certainly just thought “ah, some Scandinavian influenced something” but I don’t doubt that it’s the normal form in a lot of other languages as well.