This St’át’imcets word for “Frenchman” does not come from English!
Jan van Eijk’s fine 2013 “Lillooet-English Dictionary“, page 14, has the word pḷạ́nsmən meaning ‘Frenchman’.It analyzes this as a “borrowing from English”.
A Frenchman’s “Chinook”, hat tip to Yann Vincent (image credit: Amazon)
I disagree strongly.
The phonetics of the word are very much what they look like, [‘plαnsmən].
And this shows us that the word comes from “France-man”, not from “Frenchman”.
“France-man” is not a phrase in English.
But we know “Frans” as a word in the Chinook Jargon Kamloops Wawa newspaper from that area of British Columbia.
And Frans-man would perfectly obey the grammar of the Jargon, as a Noun+Noun compound saying ‘Frenchman’.
And Chinuk Wawa was, indeed, very commonly spoken in the general Lillooet, BC area.
So on the balance, I think we’ve once again discovered a “new” CW expression by looking into an Indigenous language.
I was born in France, I lived for several years in Quebec, and I have lived for over 20 years in British Columbia. I have visited many French-speaking groups across the country for my work, I am involved in groups interested in the history of the Pacific Northwest. And of course Chinook Jargon, Wawa is one of my interests, when I look through a Wawa dictionary, and I read the words out loud, I often perceive similarities with words or groups of words, spoken in France, in Quebec or in the Canadian Francophonie, but I cannot always locate them precisely, because this only corresponds to a transmission of words or expressions spoken, heard and written by a person with minimal knowledge to do so, but perhaps without always having all the necessary background to properly transpose them. I think it would be interesting if linguists from different cultural backgrounds examined the words of Chinook Jargon, there are undoubtedly discoveries to be made.
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