lisítaluy: Yet another Jargon word discovered
lisítaluy:
Quinault pumpkin
(Photo credit: LewisTalk)
It’s glossed as “squash” in the Quinault Salish dictionary I have. Every time I saw the word, I thought, That looks so weirdly intricate in Quinault. To be native, it would have to be made of many small parts put together strangely.
Then I had a happy moment, like in this seasonal song:
(Image credit: Mme Folkema)
…la citrouille means “pumpkin” in modern-day French! (lisítaluy may be les citrouilles, the plural.)
And it it’s from French, that means it’s from Canadian French of the earlier 1800s.
Which means it’s from Chinook Jargon.
I mean we have just about nil evidence for loans direct from French to southwest Washington indigenous languages, but dozens and dozens of examples of French words in the Jargon.
(If you go way upriver and inland, some of the Interior Salish and Dene languages have slices of their vocabulary pie that seem to have come straight from Canadian French. More fur-trade linguistic archaeology–but a story for a different day.)
Thanks to several kind friends for pointing this word’s origin out to me when I had gone up a blind alley. Native speakers of a language are worth their weight in gold. Now let’s take that hint and raise kids talking Chinuk Wawa 🙂
(Directions to my blind alley: I’d wasted a good half hour Google Books-ing 19th-century French dictionaries that had only courge, potiron, etc. etc. for squashy veggies, but no citrouille.)
Neat discovery here. I’ve seen pʰə́mpkʰin used in a Jargon story; now we have a synonym!
And today’s example is a nice illustration of why the Grand Dictionary of Chinuk Wawa that I’ll ultimately publish will contain a significant portion of words that we know primarily from the Native languages that have been in contact with the Jargon.
Henry Zenk, who did the pioneering research that led to such great things as the Grand Ronde language program and dictionary, is the person who I associate the most with that idea. hayu masi henli!
Bravo!
“19th-century French dictionaries that had only courge, potiron, etc. etc. for squashy veggies, but no citrouille.”
Personally, in my own speech I use “la citrouille” rather than “le potiron”. I consulted the TLFI which has separate entries for the two words, glosses them identically for their vegetable meaning (as opposed to slangy meanings), but does not list them as synonymous, which they are for most French people. I think that the reason for the omission of “citrouille” from the 19C dictionaries is because words ending in “ouille” [uy] tend to be derogatory (as the TLFI notes) while “potiron” sounds more respectable. Both words have (or had) secondary slangy meanings such as ‘belly’ or ‘head’ or (for citrouille) ‘grossly obese person, esp. woman’. “La courge” is any kind of squash, smaller than a pumpkin, but also a slangy word for a stupid woman. The diminutive “la courgette” means ‘zucchini’.
I think the best French dictionary is the TLFI which covers Modern French (approximately after 1650) but also cites much older forms and meanings for the same words. “Citrouille” and similar forms are attested to around 1300, but they did not start with the same meaning as nowadays. Neither did “potiron”.
p.s. I do not consider “citrouille” derogatory when referring to a pumpkin, but more “homey” than “potiron”.
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