“Blue men” and Gaelic?
Snorre’s book of sagas as published in the 1600s (image credit: Wikipedia)
I’ve previously written that Pacific Islanders and African-Americans were seen as “blue men” by Indigenous Pacific Northwesterners…
(See “Black and Blue, Kanaka Too! An Indigenous Metaphor“.)
In that article I inferred that the equation of dark skin with blue colour couldn’t be a European idea, since we don’t find it in the two major Settler languages that influenced Chinuk Wawa and PNW history.
In the time since, though, it’s come to my attention that BLUE :: DARK SKIN is in fact a Northern European metaphor.
And Scottish Gaelic, spoken by many of the numerous Scots who worked in the frontier-era fur trade, is a Northern European language. Could Gaelic potentially have influenced how “Kanakas” and Black people were spoken of out here?
When I asked for help with this on the Facebook group called “Pacific Northwest History (pre-colonial <1850s)”, a couple of people gave illuminating info.
Laila Eikeland Barr:
I don’t know Gaelic but do remember that Snorre Sturlason referred to this north African group as ‘blåmenn‘ (blue men). [I.e. in a Scandinavian Germanic language, in the 1200s AD — DDR.]
Sean Williams:
Fear (“man”) gorm (“blue”) is how you would desi[gnat]e a black man in Irish-Gaelic. If you called him a fear dubh (black man) it would mean he was a bad person.
So, if you’re still with me, we can acknowledge that Gaelic is a logically possible contributor of the “blue man” metaphor in PNW languages.
This would be the very first case where we’ve found Gaelic influence in Chinuk Wawa studies — and we’ve been seeking it for a long time.
Honestly, a professional linguist (me) finds it very unlikely that Gaelic would contribute much to the Jargon, and thence to the Native languages that took words from CW. Reasons include:
- Like the other languages that were present but didn’t make an impact on CW vocabulary, such as Hawai’ian, Kwak’wala, and Cayuse (and unlike Canadian French, English, Chinookan, and local Salish), Gaelic wasn’t a steady presence in the daily lives of kids who grew up in lower Columbia River “creole Chinuk Wawa” communities.
- All of these “relatively minor” languages share an additional trait of not having been used in “pidgin CW” settings, most prominently in intercultural trade.
So I conclude that it’s at most an interesting coincidence that Gaelic and PNW languages share the metaphor of “blue men”.
Here is where I remind my readers that in Chinuk Wawa at least, the only definitely known occurrences of this metaphor are in the phrase łíʔil-mán / łíʔil-tílixam, literally ‘black’ man or people. That is, CW łíʔil primarily means ‘black’ but has the broader usage ‘dark’ and ‘blue’ due to Indigenous cultural influence.
Snorre; snoring? (image credit: Wikipedia)
(Scottish) Gaelic was an important language in the prairie provinces in the 1800s, and spoken by a number of Metis and Scottish “Halfbreeds” as they were called at the time. Here are three quotes from my book: Bakker, Peter. 1997. “A Language of our Own”. The Genesis of Michif – the Mixed Cree-French language of the Canadian Métis. New York: Oxford University Press. 316 pp.
The reporter James Ross, son of Alexander Ross and an Indian woman (see Van Kirk 1985), commented in his Red River newspaper, the Nor’wester, about the multilingual situation in the settlement in the 1860s: “As to languages, we have English, French, Gaelic, Chippewa and Cree, and we do not enumerate all, but only those spoken by large sections of the community” (cited in Stobie 1967-1968: 73).
James Hargrave, a clerk at Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), makes the following remark about a Metis ferryman (Sprague and Frye 1983, tables 1 and 4) at the Red River forks, by the name of McDougall: “The name of the ferryman is Duncan McDougall. He is a linguist, being competent to speak English, French, Cree and Gaelic, and in consequence of his abilities and usefulness as an interpreter, ought long before his present time of life to have occupied a good position” (Hargrave 1871: 184).
“The settlement of this contract between parties ignorant of each other’s language, furnished a scene as curious as it was interesting; the language employed on one side being Gaelic and broken English, on the other, an Indian jargon and mongrel French, with a mixture of signs and gestures, wry faces, and grim countenances” (Ross 1856: 21).
Hargrave, Joseph James. 1871. Red River. Montreal: John Lovell.
Ross, Alexander. [ 1856] 1962. The Red River settlement. Its rise, progress, and present state, with some account of the native races and its general history to the present day. Minneapolis: Ross & Haines.
Stobie, Margaret. 1967-1968. Background of the dialect called Bungi. Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba III (24): 65-75.
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Hi Peter, what mark did Gaelic leave on Michif varieties, though? I’d guess that of all the contact languages of northern North America, Bungi might show Gaelic influence. But Gaelic is conspicuous for its absence of impact on other frontier languages. And I’ve hardly ever heard of folks here learning to speak it if they hadn’t grown up with it. (Among other ramifications of this trend, Indigenous spouses of Gaelic speakers might be unlikely to talk it with their husbands, hence it would be a quite rare home language overall.) It’s as if Gaelic were the Chinookan of Indo-European — a famously hard lingo to pick up. What do you think?
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There is no discernible influence of Gaelic on Michif, not even the Gaelic word for “bread”. That found its way as into Canadian indigenous English – and beyond, but not Michif. However, not all Métis were of French ancestry. It is indeed likely that Gaelic was not transmitted to subsequent generations in the Canadian West, but there may have been a significant number of speakers. If I remember well, the Edmonton School Board functioned as a bilingual institution for a while, using English and Gaelic. Immigrants from Europe, perhaps also some of the “Scottish Half-breeds”.
The Bungi language seems to have been limited to Manitoba. Gaelic influence is generally accepted.
“blue men” could be an independent development in the two continents indeed.
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Dave, Peter-
1-I agree that it seems very unlikely that Gaelic could have had any influence upon Chinook Jargon or indeed upon any Pacific Coast language, and in this sense the blue=black similarity between Chinook Jargon and Gaelic is almost certainly coincidental.
2-In Canada I do not believe there is any evidence for Gaelic ever having ever been a stable community language (however numerous its native speakers indeed were at some times and places) outside of Newfoundland and Cape Breton. Do please bear in mind that for Scottish Gaelic speakers, there was no religious barrier separating them from English speakers (unlike the case for French speakers) and no racial barrier either (unlike the case for Cree and Ojibwe speakers). So I suspect Gaelic succumbed to English very early.
Which may go a long way in explaining 1. Incidentally, I read Eleanor Blain’s description of Bungi once (a long time ago at a library far, far away…) and do not recall any clear-cut instance of Gaelic influence upon its phonology or structure (there may have existed some vocabulary items).
3-While you are right, Dave, that in North America there is little evidence for Gaelic ever having been acquired by any sizable number of people as an L2, you may be interested to learn that there is some evidence for there having existed a number of Gaelic-speaking communities in North America whose speakers were mostly of African descent (which ties in with your post topic quite nicely).
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hayu masi étienne for contributing additional informed views on this! There’s a ton of romanticized wishful thinking out there about Gaelic in North America, and most of it does us a disservice if we’re looking for the facts…
Dave
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