“Less familiar words” in the Northern Dialect (Part 2D: Le Jeune 1924: more French (A))
The implication behind Father JMR Le Jeune’s presenting this list of words seems to be that they’re considered to be Chinook Jargon somewhere else than British Columbia…
…And most of them are indeed known in the older, Southern Dialect of CJ.
Image credit: “Gone-to-the-Spirits, a Kootenai berdache“
But there’s a lot more going on here; I’ll comment as we go along.
This stuff is in Father JMR Le Jeune’s little book “Chinook Rudiments” (Kamloops, 1924), pages 30-31.
My transcription from the Chinuk Pipa shorthand alphabet includes “tz” for the letter that sometimes sounds like [ts], sometimes like [z].
Here’s the first of 2 posts about these words…
More french words.
- Berdash [SIC], bardash, hermaph[r]odite
(The Chinuk Pipa spelling with “ar” suggests Le Jeune’s familiarity with Canadian/Métis French pronunciation habits.)- carabine, karabin, rifle,
- un pou [SIC], ĩpu, louse,
(Here Le Jeune follows a bit of linguistic folklore among French commenters in imagining that this Chinookan-sourced word is instead French; there are essentially no French words in Jargon that have indefinite articles such as “un(e)”.)- café, kafi, coffee,
(The fact that this well-known Jargon word always occurs without a French-style “le” is strong proof that it’s to be credited primarily to English.)- la bride, labrid, bridle,
- l’aiguine [SIC], lgyuin*, a saw,
(This Canadian French word for ‘handsaw’, often spelled l’égoïne and a.k.a. nigwiin in Michif, must be one that Le Jeune was unfamiliar with. His “French” and Chinuk Pipa spellings of it, using the [ü] sound instead of [w], both suggest as much.)- la hache, lahash, axe,
(This is definitely a common Northern Dialect CJ word, also known from the southern interior BC place name from Canadian/Métis French, Lake La Hache.)- la graisse, lagris, grease,
(Northern Dialect CJ instead uses the English-sourced gris/klis.)- la rame, laram [SIC], oar,
(Le Jeune has apparently not heard this word in Jargon, where it’s consistently documented in the Indigenized pronunciation lalam.)- la lime, lalim, file,
- làm [SIC], rom, rhum,
(A weird spelling for the supposed “French” version of the word, actually standardized as “rhum”. This Jargon word is certainly from English instead.)- la bêche, labish, [no English translation given; ‘spade’]
(Le Jeune seems to have been confusing the etymology of lapʰəyush, which is from la pioche.)- le piège, lpiish, trap,
- la poèle, lapoil, frying pan,
(I have questions whether Le Jeune was very familiar with this word, [lapwεl]. I would have expected him to spell it ~ lapwil in Chinuk Pipa.)- la poule, lapul, hen,
- la fourchette, lafurshit, fork,
- la sangle [SIC], lasĩgl, cinge [SIC, apparently for a saddle ‘cinch’],
(Le Jeune seems to imply that CJ’s ləsanchel ‘belt’ is from the French word for ‘strap’. I’ve previously written that French la ceinture is a better match in sound and meaning.)- la selle, lasil, saddle,
- la charrue, lasharyu, plow,
