More for the ‘or’ drawer: French ‘mais’
We’ve recently seen a few examples of weird conjunctions popping up in Northern-Dialect Chinook Jargon; here’s another.
Here we seem to have French mais (‘but’).
Image credit: YouTube
I feel confident that the writer, JMR Le Jeune, intended regular old Chinuk Wawa pi (‘but/and/or’).
But he wrote mi, in the Chinuk Pipa alphabet, which I can only take as Le Jeune’s mother-tongue French:
= Priska wawa: “Wik kata klaska hilp klaska styuil
‘Prisca said, “They couldn’t help their’haws pi klaska liplit pi klaska statyu, mi kata klaska
‘church and their priests and their statues, so how are they going to’hilp naika?”
‘help me?
— Kamloops Wawa 110 (24 December 1893), page 208
Since this appears to be an absent-minded booboo, it may be evidence that we should consider the same writer’s or and o (here’s an example) to also be intrusions from other languages he spoke.
There’s certainly no evidence I’ve found in nearly 30 years of research that would suggest BC Chinook Jargon speakers knew or used French mais.
Besides, mais meaning ‘but’ makes no sense in the Jargon sentence I’m showing you!
The expected Jargon word pi, which is used all the time in the Northern Dialect to express ‘and then; and so’, does makes sense.
