‘Wheat from India’ and Métis influence on Chinuk Wawa’s sound
Chinuk Wawa has a tendency to simplify /nd/, at the end of a word, to /n/.
This isn’t news. Folks have pointed it out for 150+ years. They always mention words from English like wind becoming Chinook Jargon wín.
Wheat from India (image credit: World-Grain.com)
There’s also Grand Ronde CW t’łax̣anhæn ‘a deadbeat; good-for-nothing’, thought to come from a Salish root + English hand.
I doubt we can call CW híkchəm ‘handkerchief’ an example of the same thing — because, the English word was probably already said /hankerchief/, without the /d/. And fascinatingly, the Jargon here treats English vowel + /n/ as if it were a Métis/Canadian French nasalized vowel! (Those always get de-nasalized in Jargon.)
What’s never been pointed out in this connection is that Métis/Canadian French, too, could have been an influence.
This thought came to me as I was pondering the beautifully oddball word of Michif (i.e., the mixed Plain Cree-Métis French language of the Métis people), bladenn, meaning ‘corn’ (maize).
I don’t mind taking a sec to discuss why that word is such a weirdy:
- It comes from New World French blé d’Inde, ‘wheat from India’! The ‘wheat’ part might not be so kooky, because until European-language speakers encountered maize in the Americas, they only had other grains, which they inevitably compared maize with. In fact I’d wager, oh, $5 American that blé d’Inde shows us North American French copying North American English Indian corn. But that leads us to the core semantic weirdness here, which is that Indian corn refers accurately to North American Indigenous people, whereas d’Inde refers mistakenly to India!
- Michif bladenn contains an unexpected first vowel, /a/. We normally find older French “é” historically becoming /ii/ in Michif. I might hypothesize that the rarity of maize & maize products in the fur-trade era Prairies & western Canada led to Michif speakers becoming less familiar with the word for that item.
(But the Métis retained a good acquaintance with li blii ‘wheat’. Which we can speculate influenced the Grand Ronde Chinuk Wawa alternate pronunciation sable for ‘bread; flour’ — a less common variant of saplil.) - Most important for us here today, bladenn shows us an original French word-ending /n+STOP/ (here, /bledænd/) simplifying to plain /n/ … exactly as in Chinuk Wawa!
Offhand, I’m not coming up with any examples within Chinook Jargon of French words that similarly show such a change of nd# => n#. (Linguists show the end of a word with the hashtag, when writing phonological rules like this one.)
Can you think of any?
But the point is, it seems plausible that it was not only Pacific NW Indigenous people, but also Métis, who had the tendency to create this precise kind of simplified pronunciation of English words in Jargon.
Métis and other Canadian-French (and very likely, early Michif) speakers were very important and prominent in the Pacific NW speech community during the fur-trade era. They left many other marks on Chinook Jargon, so…
