“Haul” as a Métis/Canadian word, too
We understand Chinuk Wawa’s word hál ‘to pull’ as coming from English ‘haul’.
“City Dray” (image credit: Pinterest)
Some have pointed out that a particular source might be the specialized nautical English of the sailors aboard maritime fur-trade vessels in the earliest days of contact with Chinookans.
“Haul sail” and “haul yards” come to mind.
The nautical etymology may be sound (so to speak) — CW hál may be of old enough vintage to have come in during that era, along with plenty of Nootka Jargon words.
But I’ve been noticing another factor: the speech of the Canadian and/or Métis people who were the majority of the land-based fur trade workforce, and who were the majority of the dads in households where creole CW took form around Fort Vancouver.
- The St Laurent (Manitoba) Michif French dictionary (2016) contains ‘drag (to)’ < awli > and ‘pull’ < awl >. The spelling “aw” there stands for /a/ as in modern English “ma” or “pa”. I take < awli > as the English loan ‘haul’ + French infinitive -er.
- Allard and Laverdure’s (1983) Turtle Mountain (North Dakota) Michif dictionary defines ‘dray’ as en wawginn for pour kaykiyuw kaykwuy ay-li hauleehk — not all of which I can interpret, but it looks to be something like ‘a strong wagon for everything to be hauled’. (Compare French une waguine fort(e) pour…; Kahkiyuw kaykwuy would be ‘everything’; ay-li seems to form subordinate clauses.)
- Geddes’s description of an Acadian French dialect shows (page 237) a verb /hɔ:l/ of English and/or French origin.
Might “haul” have already been part of these people’s famously mixed speech by CW times? I’d think so; haler appears to be quite an old Norman-French word.
The earliest occurrences of CW hál that I find are in fact from the Fort Vancouver era, in Palmer 1847 and Lionnet 1853.
So, Métis speech may have influenced the history of this word in Jargon.
”Haler” in the sense of ’to pull’ (or the like) is atteasted in pretty much all 17th/18th century overseas offshoots of French: North America (Louisiana, Missouri, Acadia, Canada proper, St-Pierre & Miquelon), the circum-Caribbean (Haiti, Lesser Antilles, Guiana) and the Indian Ocean (Mauritius, Réunion, Seychelles). I would be surprised if it weren’t part of the repertoire of the French-speakers in Wawa-land. And the initial fricative is still retained in most of these varieties. (A fascination with colonial French was what once upon a time brought me to creolistics and linguistics in general, so I just checked my 30-year old notes. They also mention Normandy and Brittany in the context).
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Unfortunately this is an instance where either an English or a French etymology are possible, and I can see no phonological or semantic aspects of the word which could allow us to decide between those possibilities, since as you say Dave it is first attested in the Fort Vancouver area, where French was widely spoken. So I agree with your conclusion: “Métis speech may have influenced the history of this word in Jargon”.
BUT…one little quibble: There really is little to no reason to suppose that “Métis speech” was sharply differentiated from general colloquial Canadian French at the time.
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I like your point about the fundamental similarity of colloquial Canadian French and Métis Canadian French. I’m grateful for your sharing it here.
My main reason for persistently mentioning Métis folks in the PNW context is that they have been glossed over, as a rule, both by on-the-spot observers long ago and by the tellers of our history. Present-day readers will (as I initially did) get a mistaken impression from all those mentions of “Frenchmen” out here, just as there’s damage done by all those old references to “the Siwash tribe”, which by definition didn’t exist. (A parallel to it would be to dismiss a large swatch of PNW frontier demographics as coming from “Whiteland”.) So, I’m doing a little bit to write an awareness of the huge Métis role back into our knowledge of our history.
But there’s this, too — it’s extremely likely that distinctly Métis speech varieties, ranging from a smattering of unusual vocabulary to early “Michif” grammar, had some presence in the PNW frontier. I want us to have our ears open, to be attuned to the particular ethnic flavours that went into the recipe of Chinuk Wawa. Similarly, I try to identify the regional dialects, and ethnolects, of English that supplied this or that word to CW. Getting as specific as is reasonable about this is a help to us in understanding the factual story of how this particular pidgin-creole language took form. The unusual richness of available facts abot CW lets us test the staggering plurality of scholarly theories about contact languages’ formation and development.
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Oh yes, Haul was used in the incoming York Factory Express (cross-country York boat journey from Hudson Bay MB to Fort Vancouver, WA), when the Guide yelled “Haul, Haul, Haul,” while the men were pulling the York Boats upriver. The Guide was generally Iroquois, so perhaps the French word… but definitely Métis.
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Thanks, Nancy!
I can confirm that the usual English-language term, documented in fur-trade times, for getting a boat upstream by ropes pulled by people onshore was “to haul”. It’s noted in many journals, diaries, and so on.
Dave R.
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