A rarity: ubut contains a French preposition; why?
Grand Ronde CW speech preserves for us one of the most fascinating French-Canadian-origin words in this language…
(Image credit: TheLocal)
The word on my mind is ubút ‘end, goal’, known from speaker John B. “Mose” Hudson and listed in the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary that I hope all of you have copies of.
That dictionary is right, I expect, in assigning it an etymology in French au bout ‘at [or ‘to’] the end’.
That is an extremely common phrase in spoken French, so it’s no kind of surprise to see it reflected in pidgin or creole speech — contact languages typically consisting of a selection of the most commonly heard bits of the input languages.
The “T” sound at the end would evidently reflect nonstandard Canadian French pronunciation (compare standard French [o bu]), much as we’re told CW kapú correlates with a standard French capote.
No surprises — except —
This may be the only word in all of Chinuk Wawa that preserves a French preposition! Au bout, you understand, is proper French for à + le + bout ‘at/to the end’.
If we were to find a loanword for ‘end’ in CW shaped like (the nonexistent) *ləbú*, that would merely live up to our expectations. That’s because the big majority of francophone-sourced nouns in Jargon do start in “L”, due to the definite article le / la / les that French makes you put on a noun in many conversastional circumstances.
But here we have, not le + bout as a source, but à + le + bout!
I’m hard put to think of any other CW lexemes whose French sources begin with (just to name the semantically broadest, most frequent prepositions carrying the heaviest “functional load” in the latter language) à, dans, de, en, pour, etc.
Let me specify that it’s not so noteworthy to find an entire French phrase as the source of a Jargon word. We also have < tapahote > ‘shame (on you)’ from t’a pas honte ‘you have no shame’; lapikʰwo ‘short coat’ from l’habit court; < lumaran > from (le) loup marin (literally ‘(the) sea wolf’) ‘seal’, and so forth. (New observation on that last word — it seems possible to me that its etymology does include a definite article.)
Instead, it’s finding this type of structure — a prepositional phrase from French — in Chinuk Wawa that stands out.
Why did only this one prepositional phrase get taken up by folks who hadn’t grown up talking French?? I invite your thoughts. Perhaps the existing CW word úpʰuch ‘ass, butt, tail’ exerted some effect…?
Developing today’s subject further, I want to observe that it looks clear to me that lower Columbia-area CW (what I call the older, “southern” dialect that includes Grand Ronde) developed the Chinookan-etymology subordinating conjunction — yes, a conjunction — pus ‘if; when’ in a Canadian French influenced direction.
At some point in CW’s development, pus developed beyond its earlier “irrealis” function, that is, of marking what are essentially hypotheticals.
An example of that function would be kʰəltəs kʰupa nayka spus mayka mash nayka ‘I don’t care if you leave me’, using an alternate pronunciation of pus.
I believe it was one specific, common use of pus, to introduce purpose clauses, that led to the Frenchifying of that conjunction. An example of that usage is yaka kwanisəm tənəs-mamuk pus tuluʔ chinuk-pipa ‘He keeps putting some work into mastering the Chinook writing.’
More to the point, it’s the occurrence of this “purpose pus” with a change of grammatical subject between the main clause and the subordinate (pus) clause that could’ve been the trigger of the Canadian-influenced reanalysis I’m describing. An example of this structure would be nayka tiki pus yaka k’elapa ‘I want him to come back’, found in the Grand Ronde dictionary under pus.
The reason I’m specifying this last, most specific structure is that it happens to be exactly the same syntactic environment where French makes you throw in the preposition pour ‘for’. An example from Father Le Jeune’s Kamloops Wawa newspaper: Après cela il dit pour que la terre se dessécha [sic] ‘After that he said for the earth to dry up.’
Anyway, my argument is that this parallelism, where the similar-sounding words pus and pour both have pretty identical positions introducing different-subject purposive subordinate clauses — (albeit different functions within their respective languages!) — led to a reanalysis in the creolized lower Columbia community, where Canadian French remained a strong presence for several decades.
That’s to say, CW pus took on a new function, as a preposition. It had never been a preposition in the Chinookan languages, and I infer it worked similarly in the earliest CW. (It seems hard to find this word in the earliest word lists, however.) But under French influence, it came to be extended to additional circumstances which are normal for pour, prototypically to mean ‘for’ a noun of purpose. An example of what I mean is CW x̣awqaɬ na x̣ələl pus ‘nayka ‘I can’t move on my own (literally, for MYSELF)’ — found in the 2012 dictionary also under pus.
This is now the word for ‘for’ in the southern dialect. (Formerly the only way to say ‘for’ a purpose-noun was kʰapa, the generic preposition in CW.)
It should almost go without saying, if you’re among my regular readers, that this French-influenced change in the grammar most likely occurred in the Fort Vancouver environment.
That’s the locale and era, about 1825-1846, of the massive influx of francophone input to the Jargon, due to the founding and maintenance of a community full of stable households that usually consisted of one French Canadian parent and one Indigenous parent.
We have superb evidence that this noun-purpose pus was entrenched around Fort Vancouver by 1838, because it occurs one heck of a lot in the 1871 Demers-Blanchet-St. Onge document, which is based on late-1830s experience. Examples there include the frequent pus ikta (‘for what’) = ‘why?’ Father Lionnet’s 1853 document (1849 data) explicitly defines French pour as CW pus.
I recognize that this has been a very detailed tangent to set out on, but I think you can see the uniting theme here: The influence of French prepositions on CW.
That influence was negligible, making ubut a remarkable word…
…except that the covert hybridization of pour & pus casts its shadow all through the southern dialect!
A final tidbit: I have noticed a later French documentor of Chinuk Wawa’s northern dialect (where pus does not mean ‘for’), Father JMR Le Jeune of British Columbia, once in a while absent-mindedly slipping into this usage. Maybe this is additional evidence in support of a view that francophones have long tended to think of pus as pour. Folk etymology, anyone?
“This may be the only word in all of Chinuk Wawa that preserves a French preposition! Au bout, you understand, is proper French for à + le + bout ‘at/to the end’.”
It’s like ashnu!
Hah, great point, Alex!
Here’s the difference in the eyes of a pidgin-creole linguist:
BC CW < ashnu > is a churchy word. My sense, in other words, is that it didn’t come into the BC dialect via “naturalistic” processes of folks hearing a word in conversation & picking it up. Instead, it almost certainly came in by decree of missionary priests, as did so much other French stuff in the Jargon.
Ubut is unlikely to have come from anything but conversational sources; the one speaker who we know it from (and that limited distribution is probably significant) lived among the French Prairie families of the Willamette Valley.
I should’ve added that the earliest form of ‘knee(l)’ etc. known to us in Chinuk Wawa uses the prepositionless < shenu >, i.e. from French plural genoux ‘knees’, which I do see as more likely to have come from spoken usage.
This thinking connects with comments I’ve made about CW having several French-sourced nouns tracing to plurals without definite articles on them in French, like malakwa ‘mosquito’ from maringouins.
In fact, for those keeping score, I have no problem with assuming that genoux in spoken French occurs more frequently with the preposition (thus à genoux ‘on (one’s) knees’)! It’s just that borrowing an entire phrase including the à is very very rare for the early-creolized Jargon as it was actually spoken.
I just like to point out that /u but/ is the Métis French (and hence Michif) pronunciation of French “au bout”. It can be found for instance in the Michif Dictionary (Laverdure & Allard) on p. 49:
We live at the end of the boulevard.
Ou bout la grawn reu niweekinawn.
A tangential question. Knowing just enough of Michif grammar and phonology to be dangerous, I’m wondering whether this Laverdure & Allard sentence can be parsed as …bout d la…?
The final -t is certainly part of the word /but/, as Etienne also points out. It is always /but/, and indeed it is what one expects on the basis of Canadian French.
1-“Au bout”, with realized final /t/, is rampant in present-day Québec French: in colloquial speech it is an intensifier: “C’est stupide /obut/” means “It is VERY stupid”, not “It is stupid to the end”. “C’est au bout”, realized as /stobut/ or /seobut/, means “It’s incredible”: English “far out” offers an instance of similar semantic evolution (in fact, I would not be surprised if the present-day semantics of /obut/ arose as a loan translation of “far out”).
2-Interestingly, /obut/ is thus realized even by speakers who would realize the noun (whose meaning is the same as in the standard) as /bu/ (I am one such speaker, incidentally), suggesting that /obut/ and /bu/ may synchronically need to be analyzed as separate lexemes. If so, it does suggest that perhaps /obut/ was borrowed into CW with its preposition because it was likewise parsed/perceived as monomorphemic. Hmm. Just thinking out loud here…Could “C’est au bout”, with its older meaning of “It is at the end”, have caused “Au bout” to be (mis)perceived as a monomorphemic adjective?
3-Peter: Yes, /ubut/ is indeed the realization of “au bout” in Métis French/Michif. Unfortunately, this phonological realization is also rampant in non-Métis varieties of Canadian French, where unstressed + open /o/ is very liable to be raised to /u/, especially if a stressed /u/ follows in the next syllable (as is the case here). Thus, “beaucoup” is much more often realized as /buku/ than as /boku/ in Québec French today. What is specific about Métis French/Michif is the fact that /o/ is raised to /u/ EVEN WHEN IT IS STRESSED.
4-What this means is that /ubut/ certainly derives from Canadian French, as the final /t/ makes plain, but there is otherwise nothing specifically Métis about its phonology.
Gratuitously I can add that English speakers here in Spokane who know no French speak of an expensive item costing [‘buku] bucks!
Etienne (3-4): Quand j’étais petite, ma famille habitait dans le sud-est de la Normandie, la région appelée le Perche. Avant de savoir écrire “aujourd’hui”, mes soeurs et moi disions toujours “Oujourdui”, ce qui je dis encore souvent en parlant avec elles, bien que je sois tout à fait capable de pronouncer le “Au” (mais ce n’est pas aussi facile avant le “ou” de “jour”). Il me semble que nos parents (élevés à Paris) prononçaient “Au”, jamais “Ou”. Je crois donc que nous prononcions comme les autres enfants, presque tous Percherons, et que personne ne faisait de remarques sur notre prononciation.
La petite ville où nous habitions (Mortagne) était proche d’une autre ville (Tourouvre) connue comme ayant été un centre d’émigration vers le Canada au 17ème siècle, alors que la guerre civile appelée la Fronde avait entraîné une grave crise économique. Ces événements ne sont pas oubliés: Tourouvre a un petit musée de l’émigration, et dans son église un vitrail commémore le départ des Percherons. Il y a aussi un petit centre d’études universitaires spécialisé, et une Société Perche-Canada qui organise des voyages d’un pays à l’autre, qui souvent rassemblent des gens qui ont le même nom (Tremblay est l’un de ces noms très répandus des deux côtés de l’océan).