Another Fort Vancouver CW word from Canadian French
You can read something a thousand times before it sinks in…
An antique French threshing board (image credit: Chairish)
Today, while writing and researching another article, my eyes landed on a particular expression in Demers – Blanchet – St Onge 1871, a little book based on data from circa 1838-1840 in the vicinity of Fort Vancouver.
The phrase is < mamuk pat > ‘to thresh’, that is, to beat stalks of grain in order to release the seeds.
I don’t recall any of us linguists previously drawing attention to the root verb shown here, uniquely, I think; no other source seems to document it. (And Samuel V. Johnson’s 1978 dissertation, which combines many old CW vocabularies, left out this important 1871 source.)
The etymological source is surely one or both of the following in (Canadian/Métis) French, if I take my Petit Larousse Illustré 2004 as a guide:
- battre ‘to beat grain’
- batte ‘threshing implement’
If we trace < pat > to the verb, it’s presumably from the familiar (2nd person singular) imperative form, batte! I say this because we’ve previously established that the big majority of CW words of Canadian origin were commands in French.
It seems slightly less likely that < pat > is from the French noun. It’s not semantic grounds that cause me to say so, as I find it totally plausible for the name of a Euro-American tool to be French; there are several such in the Jargon, including (le)mula ‘mill’ and kalapin ‘rifle’.
It’s just that almost all nouns from French in CW came with a definite article le/la/les, which we don’t see on < pat >. (On the other hand, as the previous two examples show, it’s mechanical implements that are most likely to show up without articles in CW.)
If there had been a Canadian expression making an indefinite use of the noun, along the lines of *faire (des) battes*, we would have a good case for this second analysis — But I find no such phrasing in a Google Books search on the 19th century.
So I recommend we go with the etymology in the French verb “batte!”
In either eventuality, the shifting of an original French voiced “B” to a Jargon voiceless “P” indicates the relatively great age of this word in the language. It was present long enough, and in a sufficiently Indigenous-influenced environment, to have evolved in pronunciation.
One possibility is… It seems that Lower Chinookan had unvoiced consonants and Upper Chinookan had voiced consonants. Ankuttie versus Angaddie, Naika versus Naiga. Mamook Pat could also show age in that French/English words adopted in Fort George and early Fort Vancouver were unvoiced. If this word had been adopted after things had settled in Fort Vancouver it would have been mamook bat…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks much for bringing that up, Dave. That one got left out of our Chinuk Wawa dictionary (Grand Ronde, 2012). I didn’t include lexemes whose phonetic forms couldn’t be identified, and that French source escaped me. It turned up later, and I just spent about an hour going through my folders full of papers (pre-digital hell) and failed to turn up any note on it. At the time I believe I was confused by the possibility that one of those Chinookan ideophones might be the source: ([pʼət] ‘prod’ (a stretch, I know), which probably contributed to my decision to leave it out, even though it is in Demers and I tried to include all of Demers (only leaving out items whose phonetic forms couldn’t be verified against elder speaker pronunciations and/or source-language forms).
Re voiced and unvoiced segments in Chinookan, they turn up in all three documented languages (Lower Chinook, Kathlamet, Kiksht), only it is uncertain to what extent they functioned to contrast between different Chinookan word meanings; they also tended to get confused in English and French speakers’ perceptions. Dell Hymes found Boas’s Kathlamet transcriptions so inconsistent on the contrast that he eliminated it from his respellings of Boas’s transcriptions – so he shows p, t, k, q, never the voiced counterparts, though Boas’s original transcriptions do show those. Silverstein posits both voiced and unvoiced segments for all three languages. In Kiksht there is a system of diminutive-augmentative contrasts that turn in part on a voiced vs unvoiced contrast.
LikeLiked by 1 person
First, a correction: the imperative forms (second singular, first plural and second plural) of “battre” are “bats” /ba/, “battons” /batɔ̃/ and “battez” /bate/, respectively: /bat/ only exists as the third person plural of the present indicative and subjunctive (“battent”) or as the forms of all three persons of the singular of the present subjunctive (“batte, “battes”) -yes, French inflectional morphology can be challenging. My students weep whenever they’ve a new irregular verb to learn: since I assume they weep with joy, it makes me feel so good, as a teacher, to give them so much extra pleasure in their lives in the form of new irregular verbs.
(Yes, I am a very bad person. slaps self).
Thus, the etymon of the CW word (if we assume it indeed derives from the verb) is probably the infinitive “battre”, since French final post-consonantal liquids are regularly deleted in most colloquial registers of French: it seems well-nigh certain that French-Canadian as well as Métis speakers would have realized this infinitive as /bat/, just like most native speakers of French do today.
Second, could the initial /p/ instead of the expected /b/ be due to the devoicing effect of the /k/ of “mamuk”? If /bat/ indeed only existed within the context of the collocation /mamuk bat/ I could easily see this devoicing taking place. If so, we have no way to tell how old this borrowing into CW is.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Merci beaucoup for your help with the French inflections! This adds delightfully to the puzzle, as French infinitives rarely are the most likely source of CW words. It’s reasonably clear, isn’t it, that “battre” is indeed used in speaking of grain threshing?
LikeLike
Oh yes, “battre le grain” is a a well-rooted expression: no etymological problem on that side. If French infinitives are rare as an etymological source for CW borrowed French verbs, this could indicate an unusually early or an unusually late borrowing in the case of /pat/. My understanding is that there were plenty of L1 French speakers in Fort Vancouver, and combine this with the fact that to an L1 francophone the infinitive typically qualifies as the “unmarked” form of the verb, and I would bet that we are dealing with a late borrowing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Is there any chance that French-Canadians would have pronounced the 2.SG imperative < bats > as [bat]? Just as we find many words with nonstandard realizations of etymological /t/ in CW, such as kapú…
LikeLike
Dave: No, there is no real possibility of the imperative singular ever having been pronounced as anything other than /ba/ anywhere in North American French. Thus the infinitive “battre” is pretty much the only plausible etymon of the word.
One last thing: could “battre” be a nonce borrowing? This might explain both its unusual morphological appearance (deriving from an infinitive rather than an imperative) and its being unattested except in the one source you quote.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I support your reasoning on this. “Battre” as a nonce borrowing is the best explanation. But it’s disfavoured by the observed data; the real-world CW vocabulary deriving from French is 100% traceable to everyday speech. Nonce borrowings from French into CW are confined to the Christian religious sphere, as far as I’ve ever found — in all dialects of CW. Hmmm…
LikeLike