How ‘stirrups’ is a remarkable word in Chinuk Wawa
Here’s how Chinuk Wawa’s word sitle(y) is a totally one-of-a-kind phenomenon.
It’s not as if it’s the only word we know for ‘stirrups’ — because we also know a longer form of this Canadian/Métis French-sourced item, lesitle(y).
Image credit: Rocky Mountain Métis Association
But that second, longer variant is your clue to where I’m going today.
[With the parenthesized (y), I’m showing that the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary writes these words both with and without that final letter.]
Sitle(y) is the only Chinook Jargon word I can think of where an original French definite plural article les+noun phrase got re-analyzed as a CW noun starting in s.
Standard French spelling: < les étriers >; pronunciation: [lezetrie]. Presumed pronunciation that was inputted to CJ, in a Métis/Canadian accent: *[lizitrii].
Take off the [li], and Chinook-Jargon-ize that by turning z>s and r>l, and you get something like [sitliy].
That sort of thing, a removal of the article while leaving part of it attached to the noun, happens a lot in French-based pidgins and creoles, as well as in some nonstandard/rural dialects of French.
Considering how very much of the horse-culture terminology in Chinook Jargon came from Métis/Canadian French, I’m surprised to not find any relatives of this word in the Michif dictionaries.
(The one dictionary that has an entry for ‘stirrup’ just gives us a phrase meaning ‘for the saddle’!)
But we do know that there are parallel instances in Michif, where it’s easy to find a few other vowel-first, plural, words that got re-interpreted as having a “s” or more likely a “z” before that vowel: zur ‘bear’ (French ours), zo ‘bone’ (os), zarb(r) ‘tree’ (arbre), etc.
At any rate:
The existence of sitley in Chinook Jargon, as isolated a case as it is, adds to our ample evidence that Chinuk Wawa was hugely influenced by the Métis/Canadian French of male fur-trade workers, circa 1811-mid 1840s.
