La cingle, or la ceinture?
Métis sash (image credit: Kikino.org)
George Gibbs’s influential 1863 dictionary of Chinuk Wawa supplies etymologies.Gibbs suggests the sources of words whenever he has an idea of them, and he has a couple of ideas about < la-sánjel > (page 14) / < la san-jelʹ > (page 33), meaning ‘a girth; a sash; a belt’, coming, he says from “French, LA CINGLE“.
First I’d bring your attention to the varying stress patterns indicated there. Canadian (Métis) French-derived words in the Jargon display some unpredictability in this respect, in Gibbs’s 1850s-1860s data. I’d generalize that such words settled into a pattern of word-final stress eventually, but from Gibbs we find
- < le-báh-do > and < labʹ-a-do > ‘shingle’
- < le-bisʹ-kwie > ‘biscuit’
- < le-máh > and < léh-ma> ‘hand’
So, still somewhat early in the history of francophone influence on Chinook Jargon, there was more variation in the placement of word stress.
This suggests to my mind a more active, day-to-day influence from French, a language whose stress pattern you can generalize as “last syllable of the word” if you’re talking about single words. (As you might with loans from it into English or Jargon.) In connected speech, however, French gives a much more complicate impression, with stresses varying in location depending on adjacent words, syntactic functions, and so forth. And we know that French speakers were a constant part of the local scene on the lower Columbia River into the mid- and later 1800s, since they settled in and married into local communities.
The other element of Gibbs’ Métis “sash” word in Jargon that we ought to focus in on is its source. Try as I might, I can’t find an actual modern French noun *la cingle to match his suggested etymology. There’s a verb of this shape, but it would require a pronoun subject: (elle/il) la cingle ‘she/he whips her/it’. And it’s a verb. Meanwhile, in any case our hypothetical noun would be a poor match, phonologically, for ləsanchel, as the Grand Ronde dictionary of 2012 spells it. It’s hard to justify having a “G” sound correspond with a “CH”. And *la cingle wouldn’t give you the stress-variant < la san-jelʹ >.
Much more exact is the etymology Grand Ronde points out, in a real word of French, la ceinture ‘belt’. Canadian dialects as well as the mixed French-Cree language Michif pronounce this very much like the Jargon word, as in Michif en saencheur.
Yet another example of the layers of history you can excavate from a single Chinuk Wawa word, with a little linguistic archaeology!
The word you are looking for is la sangle, a strong belt-like thing used for reinforcing a bag, bundle, suitcase, or similar object which might fall apart without it, or a horse’s harness under its belly. One Canadian French pronunciation of nasal vowels might make this word sound to a person used to European French like “cingle”, a verb form. On the other hand, sandjel could be a dialectal variant of sangle rather than a version of la ceinture.
The verb cingler is not just ‘to whip’ but to whip especially forcibly, ‘to lash’. It is also used metaphorically, as in un commentaire cinglant, a comment that is particularly nasty and hurtful. To describe a person as cinglé (perhaps an old-fahioned acjective now? ) means “crazy”,
< le-báh-do > and < labʹ-a-do > ‘shingle’ : the French word is le bardeau.
Thank you so much for pointing out “la sangle”, Marie-Lucie! This is really good to know. I still doubt that it could be the source of the Jargon word, due to the “dj” sound, but now I wonder whether there could have been any folk-etymological overlap in francophone minds between “la sangle” and “la ceinture”. For what it’s worth, I’m not able to find a counterpart to “la sangle” in the Turtle Mountain Michif Dictionary — only of “ceinture”. (And “belt” and “strap”!) What are the chances of “la sangle” NOT making its way to the Pacific Northwest, especially since so many horse-culture words of Chinuk Wawa are French??
I guess I forgot the wort ‘strap’ – la sangle is a strap, usually heavy duty (not part of a piece of clothing).
dj instead of g occurs in some French dialects, especially Acadian (eg la djerre for la guerre ‘war’, via la guierre, also dialectal).
On the other hand, it is possible that in Michif and CW (or their ancestor) la sangle was replaced in most cases by la ceinture.
Would you agree that < la sangle > is NOT a candidate for palatalization, where /g/ => /dj/? My sense is that such palatalization in Canadian French mainly happens to dental sounds, and is associated with an immediately following high-front vowel. (Although, to slightly complicate things, there can be some variation between /d/ and /g/ in that environment, as in < le bon Dieu > ~ < le bon Guieu >, yeah?)
There is also a verb sangler and its participle/adjective sanglé. I have often read (in older novels) descriptions of soldiers in uniform as bien sanglé, meaning stiffly buttoned up, belted, etc, as for a parade or when posing for an official photograph.
Also good to be aware of! Would anyone have referred to a belt/sash/waistband/strap as *”la sanglée”, literally “the belting/cinching”?
(Here is where I mention to my readers that the Chinuk Wawa and French words are related to (American) English “cinch”, which in its horsey sense replaced an earlier French loan “surcingle”.)
“la sanglée”: NO. If there was such a word it would mean ‘amount contained in a sangle’.
Most of the derived nouns in -ée imply content, whether concrete or not (like the Eng suffix -ful)
une cuillerée ‘spoonful’ (= amount contained in a spoon)(la cuiller or cuillère)
une louchée ‘ladleful’ ( ””””””””””””” ladle)(la louche)
une bolée ‘bowlful” (””””””””””’ bowl)(le bol)
une platée ‘plateful’ (”””””””’ large plate, serving plate) (le plat)
une bouchée ‘morsel’ (amount of food normally put in one’s mouth, less than Eng ‘mouthful’) (la bouche)
une poignée ‘handful, fistful’ (le poing ‘fist’)
une journée ‘(work, etc) day’ (amount of light, work, travel, etc normally filling a day)(le jour)
une nuitée ‘night’ (eg ‘amount’ of night, e.g. to sleep in)
and a number of others.
Aha, I see how you’re conceptualizing this -ée. I had in mind the suffix in journée, Italian mattinata, Spanish quebrada that I broadly take as ‘an event, an instance of’. I’m grateful to have a native francophone who is a trained linguist to help me understand this stuff!
I wonder about a rule on the syllable accents. In BC we have lePIED for foot but LEEmah for hand. It could be because one is masculine and one is feminine.
In BC French?
sam, how is lePIED pronounced, apart from the stress?
the suffix in journée, Italian mattinata, Spanish quebrada that I broadly take as ‘an event, an instance of’.
See above for journée. Similarly Italian mattinata = French la matinée, ‘(amount of time in) the morning’. For instance, Je te téléphonerai dans la matinée ‘I will phone you in (= during) the morning’ (not ‘dans le matin’). All those words are derivatives of NOUNS. But Spanish quebrada is derived from a VERB, like (for instance) Fr une raclée ‘a slap in the face’ (concrete, not figurative). The verbal ones are indeed events, etc.
Would you agree that < la sangle > is NOT a candidate for palatalization, where /g/ => /dj/?
Normally I would agree, but I can’t see another way to account for the /dj/ here. Of course a word-final gle is not very common. But /dj/ might be an approximate rather than correct transcription (see last comment down).
My sense is that such palatalization in Canadian French mainly happens to dental sounds, and is associated with an immediately following high-front vowel.
What you refer to is a different instance, as with dix’10’ /dzis/ (not /djis/). (Not quite /dz/ either, but a single sound pronounced with teeth closed).
(Although, to slightly complicate things, there can be some variation between /d/ and /g/ in that environment, as in < le bon Dieu > ~ < le bon Guieu >, yeah?)
This is common in some Western French rural dialects, so le Bon Guieu et le guiâb
‘le Bon Dieu et le diable’. The initial consonant is not a velar [g] but a palatal.
Lol…and here (Kamloops), in localized patois, the “ceinture fleshee” (and by a hundred other mangled renderings), is still known as a “sass”. It shows the heavy late post- contact period influences of both multi-lingual mixed bloods, and acclimatized Brits who brought their lingua franca with them from elsewhere, usually morphing through Cree, michif, illiterate English, and possibly CW.
🙂 That is great. I’m so happy you shared this in a comment!
— Dave