“la-let” = milk?
(Image credit: KeyWordSuggest.org)
A Métis girl who was there tells us a new word…
“The Daughter of Angus MacDonald” by Christina MacDonald McKenzie Williams (born 1847) is a 1922 article in the Washington Historical Quarterly (13:107-117).
This is a source who ought to know plenty; her dad was chief factor of Fort Colvile; she knew Chief Kamiakin; Christina Lake nearby in British Columbia’s Kootenay district is named for her; and so on.
So I pay attention when Christina tells us,
I recall at old Hudson’s Bay Company Colville an Indian named
“La-let”. My uncle Archibald MacDonald in charge of the post
in the ’30’s had twin sons born whom his wife, Jane Klyne Mac-
Donald, was unable to nurse and they were nursed by an Indian
woman whose own child was raised on Cow’s milk. This was an
entirely new departure for the Indians and half breeds and the In-
dian youngster received the name of La-let. (page 111)
That’s recognizable from standard French le lait ‘milk’. But the standard (which is to say European) pronunciation is [ləlε], while the implication of Christina’s spelling is [lalεt]. I take it this is a more typically Canadian Métis pronunciation variant; compare Chinuk Wawa’s kapu from French capot(e). Do my readers have more to tell about that?
I thought this word was interesting to point out for an additional reason. Christina may be implying that it’s Chinuk Wawa. In that case, it would be a new discovery.
On the other hand, it’s precisely in Christina’s Plateau region of Washington and BC that we find lots of loanwords in the Native languages coming, not via Chinook Jargon as we know it, but recognizably from Métis French.
Which is a big reason why I’ve long inferred that the Jargon didn’t come into use in those regions — even though they were early brought into the fur trade system — until several decades after its first mention in the historical record, circa 1805 on the lower Columbia River. It’s useful to have a sense of “where and when”, instead of indiscrimately assuming Chinook Jargon was in use across the whole Pacific Northwest throughout frontier times. That mistaken assumption has been made often & perpetuated thoughtlessly. It robs us of a proper understanding of what was going on…
Maybe this name is the abbreviation of a longer French word, for instance l’allaiteuse [laletøz] “the breastfeeding one” (given the story about the name).
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A perhaps simpler possibility is that it is a verb form (elle) l’allaite “(she) breastfeeds him”, understood as meaning “his wet nurse”.
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Thanks Guillaume, this line of reasoning makes a great deal of sense to me. It reminds me that, as French faded from widespread use in the Pacific Northwest, people’s grasp of it would have deteriorated. Stranger things have happened in situations of language obsolescence than a verb being remembered as a noun!
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What I had in mind was not necessarily imperfect knowledge of French on the part of the people who borrowed the word. I wonder if there are there verb borrowings from French in languages of the North-east; if this is the case, then we could imagine that the verb was first borrowed (as a verb) into a salishan language, where you can relativize a verb by using a finite form in a NP with an article (my knowledge of them is very rudimentary, but it seems to me that if you had a root lalet “suckle”, something like “tsi lalet” would probably mean “the one(fem) who suckles” — of course, don’t hesitate to correct me if I am wrong about this). Then, with a language of this type as intermediary, the word could have been borrowed into Chinook wawa as a noun meaning “wet nurse”(or maybe even, with passive orientation, “infant suckled by a wet nurse”).
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Hi Guillaume, I’m stealing a moment away from cooking my family’s Thanksgiving dinner, so I’ll be very brief. I like your suggestion; let me think it through here. I’m not aware of any French verb borrowings into Salish languages, which in any case have their own verbs for ‘breastfeeding’. There exist several French verbs borrowed into Chinuk Wawa downstream in the heartland of the pidgin-creole, which I infer reflects the higher intensity of the contact situation. That is, French-speaking Canadians intermarried with Native women and set up households around Fort Vancouver and the Willamette Valley, thus exerting more influence over the linguistic mix than they would have in a situation dominated more by economic (trading) dynamics, as we see farther up the Columbia watershed.
In case I’m not totally clear in my post above, I’m not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that “lalet” was local Chinuk Wawa term, though it could have been. What it provides evidence of, instead, is the formerly potent but steadily declining role of French in the mixed fur-trade communities. Christina’s understanding of the word “lalet” says much about the level of French fluency of even a person who was brought up in a household where the language would have been frequently heard from both mother-tongue and second-language speakers.
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In the old days when a woman was unable to breastfeed, she sought the help of une nourrice who would provide the baby with milk from her own breasts. When talking to a new mother, women relatives asking if she is breastfeeding or planning to are more likely to use the verb nourrir (‘to feed (tr)’, but ‘to nurse (tr)’ in this particular context). I have never heard of the word allaiteuse, which seems superfluous since nourrice already exists, and allaiter is a somewhat higher register than nourrir.
I think that lalet is simply le lait, with the final written t actually sounded. Remember the song about the shoemaker, with the word dret (= Can. French spelling drette showing the t sound).
(I would have written earlier, but I got confused about QʰÁTA MÁYKA TƏ́MTƏM? which was in an earlier post – I did not realize right away that it was a question for potential commenters).
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Is there a good reference source on Canadian French that might tell us about pronunciation variants such as I’ve suggested for “la lait”?
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So I tracked down Albert Valdman’s wonderful “Dictionary of Louisiana French” as an example of a folksy North American dialect. His entry for < lait > ‘milk’ indicates 3 pronunciations, [le] [lɛ] and — whaddayaknow — [let] with a “t” at the end! Wanting to be sure this wasn’t just him listing a “liaison” form, I read on page xxi about the structure of entries’ pronunciation field, and there’s no indication of such a practice. So maybe here we have corroboration that some French dialects of N Am have pronounced the “t” at the end of < lait >.
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Valdman’s Dictionary of Louisian French:
https://books.google.com/books?id=vw5TIVBcNsIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=lait&f=false
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Final consonants which went mute in Standard French were retained in a number of dialects. For instance, while most Québécois’ ancestors came from Northwest France (especially Normandy and the French-speaking area of Brittany), most Acadians (who arrived earlier) originate from the coastal area South of the Loire river, in the provinces of Vendée and Poitou, an area of salt marshes which allowed them to know how to deal with similar terrain in Nova Scotia. Modern Acadian dialects still have many features of those provincial dialects, one of which is the preservation of final -t. Many Acadian names end in -et, as in the family names Gaudet, Manet or Ouellet in which the -t is [t]. In Québec the same names, originally from Acadians who migrated there, are spelled with final -ette. I think that officials and priests hearing the final [et] from illiterate persons must have written -ette because that’s how most Standard or Québec French names ending in [et] would be spelled.
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Wanting to be sure this wasn’t just him listing a “liaison” form
A singular noun, such as le lait, is not subject to liaison with a following word. Liaison occurs in cases of plural agreement in an Adj+N sequence (but not N+Adj), and NP+Verb or verb+complement in some cases (though not so much in casual speech). So for example in lait écrémé ‘skim milk’, there is no liaison, but ce lait est écrémé ‘this milk is skimmed’, in casual speech there would be no liaison at all, and ce lait est_écrémé is possible but would sound rather pretentious.
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Liaison occurs in cases of plural agreement in an Adj+N sequence (but not N+Adj)
Correction: Liaison can occur with N+Adj but in a somewhat higher register than casual or uneducated conversation.
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