Confirmation of lisítaluy ‘squash’ from Canadian French
(image credit: Clackamas County Arts Alliance)
Previously in this space…
I’ve written that a word for ‘squash’ in Quinault Salish of southwestern Washington, lisítaluy, is not just from French les citrouilles — it had to have come via Chinuk Wawa.
Even though we hadn’t previously known such a Jargon word!
Well, now I’ve found what I consider enough evidence to tilt things decidedly in the Jargon direction.
Because in a (linguistically) unrelated language, Clackamas Upper Chinookan of northwestern Oregon, the same word shows up.
The common factor is not a ton of direct contact with French-speaking people; you can’t reliably claim that for Quinault, even though Clackamas is right in the early creolized zone of Chinook Jargon and would’ve interacted with Canadian French talk to some degree.
The uniting theme is instead the Jargon.
In Clackamas, the word I’ve just found is i-sídlu ‘squash’ in “Clackamas Texts”, page 540.
A detail or two about that that I find really neat —
What was originally the French plural definite article les, pronounced li in Jargon and from all indications also in Canadian/Métis French, became what I’ve sometimes referred to as a prefixed marker of the noun class in Jargon. Some of us linguists might take the behavior of Clackamas ‘squash’ as support for that latter idea. Because the speaker Victoria Howard, who was also natively fluent in Grand Ronde Chinuk Wawa, effectively replaces that li- with normal Clackamas masculine noun prefix i-.
Also notable, both Quinault & Clackamas have exactly the same stress placement in the French root word, i.e. on the sí syllable. Whereas French stress is pretty mobile, it tends to be more fixed within Chinuk Wawa. So by finding the word in an additional language, we’ve gained the opportunity to sort of triangulate back to what a CW form would’ve sounded like.
The loss of the final y sound in the Clackamas borrowing of the word for ‘squash’, by the way, makes it sound precisely like what we’d expect for a borrowing of French le(s) citron(s) ‘lemons’! However, common sense tells us that’s not what’s going on. As a tropical crop, citrus fruits were fantastically rare and expensive on the early Pacific Northwest frontier, whereas squash and pumpkin seeds were easily transportable and grew readily in our climate.
So adding up all the clues, I’m daring to proclaim lisítaluy as a Chinuk Wawa noun that we accidentally never learned from our dictionaries. The evidence for it looks really strong to me.
“la sitaluy” ‘pumpkin’
Various types of smaller squashes are called in French “la courge”, from Latin “cucurbita”. The large squash known as “la citrouille” or “le potiron” is said to be native to a Southern region of North America, including Mexico. This is not where CW originated or where there was a significant French presence.
According to the TLFI, OF “citrole” ‘pumpkin’ is an adaptation of an Italian word and there is only one attestation, in a medical text. But if the pumpkin originated in America, perhaps the Italian word referred to a different sort of squash. The other French attestations are all much later, with the ending “ulle” or “ouille”. The TLFI does link the “citr-” stem meaning “yellow” with Latin “citrus” and its derivatives such as French “citron” ‘lemon’. The TLFI comments on the ending “-ouille” which indeed is slightly derogatory (“low class”) and must have been adopted at a later date. The large size of the vegetable probably influenced the adoption of the derogatory ending.
For me, “le potiron”, a word attested later than “la citrouille”, refers to the same vegetable, although there must be slight differences, perhaps between subspecies. But the word does not have the negative connotation of “la citrouille”, so it is preferred for instance on a menu featuring “la soupe au potiron” ‘pumpkin soup’. The TLFI says that the word originally referred to a large mushroom and its origin is doubtful.
Hmm but I thought we’ve seen it before. In my CJ notes I have:
siklo, lêsitlo, lacitrouille