lápʰusmu, from Mississippi Valley French
apishamore (image credit: The Free Dictionary)
Another in my series on documenting French sources of Chinuk Wawa words…
lápʰusmu ‘saddle-blanket; sitting-blanket; bed’ in the Grand Ronde Tribes 2012 dictionary comes with a note on its ultimate origin as an Ojibwa word, and a comment identifying its initial l- as a French sign of a historical fur-trade role in bringing it to the Jargon.
I’d just add that the noun stem itself is definitely known in North American French varieties that played such a prominent part in Chinook Jargon’s development.
For example, the “Glossary of Mississippi Valley French” by McDermott (1941) tells us —
apichimont, apishimeau, Ind., n. A covering made of skins (Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 116 and n. 1). In Townsend’s Narrative of a Journey (145) the word appears as apishemeau, which Thwaites, the editor, explained as “mats made of reeds, used for building wigwams, carpets, beds, coverings of all sorts.” Thwaites added: “The early Algonquian term was ‘apaquois.‘ ” Ruxton, however, described apishamores as “saddle-blankets made of buffalo-calf skins” (In the Old West, 102).
Notice that McDermott doesn’t decide which gender it is in French! He only describes it as “n.”, a noun. Normally in a word’s entry, he follows that with “f.” or “m.” The omission could signify something of interest:
- Less so if it just means he got the word from folks’ isolated dictionary-style citations, such as those given in the entry.
- More so, to us Chinuk Wawa people, if it indicates the word was typically spoken with the gender-indeterminate definite article l’ just as we find in Jargon.
And if the word in Mississippi French ended in /o/, the raising of that to /u/ would be expected from Métis French phonology, wouldn’t it? That could be taken to suggest that it passed through two varieties of French before entering the pidgin.
Not to mention the great diagnostic of French-to-Chinuk Wawa loans, oralization of originally nasal vowels! As in “lima” (hand, arm), “ləmətay” (mountain), etc.
I’m surprised by the aspiration, though. Is that regular?
A fine question, David. I’ll revisit it in greater detail, but off the cuff, yes, this aspiration seems like it reflects the intersection of French phonology (two stop series, voiceless (unaspirated) vs. voiced) with that of Chinookan (where the relevant opposition is apsirated vs. unaspirated), not to mention Salish (where stops are voiceless and typically strike my ear as aspirated).
It is in any case regular.
Pretty much, eh? I’m currently connecting this with an article in the newly-arrived issue of “Language”, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America. There, Wetzels & Nevins show nicely how phonetic happenings like prenasalization of stops obey fine-grained rules. So results are less predictable than I reckon we’ve usually imagined. You can get quite distinct pronunciations in two neighboring dialects. What this gets me thinking is that a study like Samuel V. Johnson’s 1978 dissertation, which in the spirit of Michael Silverstein, tried to come up with simple correspondence rules for predicting how Jargon would be pronounced according to folks’ L1 (“mother tongue”), could stand to be revised and refined. With fascinating outcomes.