So many Métis words in interior PNW languages (Part 11: Spokane Salish — a bill of goods)

Another in our ongoing collection of Canadian/Métis French words that show up in a very interesting geographical pattern: they’re loaned into the Indigenous languages of the Interior Pacific Northwest!

Why is that interesting?

Image credit: Pix4Free 

It’s interesting because that’s precisely the same region where Canadian/Métis French was the first post-contact lingua franca — not being displaced until Chinook Jargon came into existence and (call it the 1850s) slowly expanded out from the Fort Astoria & Fort Vancouver zone.

(Here’s a link to all previous installments in this mini-series.)

Once again, we find a shopping list of items that became important in trade when the North West Company and Hudson Bay Company established regular presences in our region — as well as a word for ‘Mexican’, which quite possibly dates to the same era of horse transport, which came to be a specialty of that cultural group.

• lamnás ‘molasses’
  from la mélasse, nativized by turning /l/ => /n/, which is a historically common development in PNW languages and may have been encouraged by the adjacent nasal /m/
  (An old note I wrote in my Spokane dictionary documents elder Pauline Flett’s report of the related word lamnús, translated by her as ‘honeyface’, a term of endearment. Compare the nativizing truncation under ‘tea’ below.)
• leputén ‘bottle’
  from la bouteille 
• lewén ‘oats’
  from l’avoine
• leyén ‘material; yardgoods’
  possibly from la laine ‘wool’; see my discussion of this minor mystery as also loaned into Secwepemctsin in the meaning ‘cloth; calico’
  (https://chinookjargon.com/2022/02/28/so-many-metis-words-in-interior-pnw-languages-part-3-secwepemctsin/)
• likók ‘rooster’
  from le coq
• lipá ‘bread (Kalispel dialect)’
  from le pain, which is specifically yeast bread; contrast with lqelét below
• lipúl ‘chicken’
  from les poules (plural), not from singular la poule
• lipwá ‘peas’
  from les pois 
• lití ‘tea’
  from le thé
  (There’s an interesting derived form sn-lí-tn meaning ‘teapot’! Compare the nativizing truncation under ‘molasses’ above.)
• lqelét ‘bread’
  from la galette, which is specifically ‘bannock; frybread’; contrast with lipá above
• lkepú ‘coat’
  from le capot
• lkʷosó ‘pig’
  from le cochon
• ? lolwá ? ‘brass beads’
  (Although this refers to a post-contact item, I don’t know of any similar-sounding French word that could be a source for it. And I seem to remember Dr. Barry Carlon, who co-created the Spokane dictionary with Pauline Flett, telling me in conversation that this word comes from a native Salish root something like /lʕʷ/. I’d connect that with the roots /lóʕʷ/ ‘fit together’ and/or /líw/ ‘sound of a bell’.)
• lpót ‘cup’
  from le pot ‘pot’, in a recognizably Canadian/Métis pronunciation
  (I have an old note written in my Spokane dictionary that elder Pauline Flett “always pronounces this glottalized, as l̓pót, and analyzes it as a diminutive”, that is as ‘little pot’.)
• spayól ‘Spaniard’
  from (l’)espagnol ‘the Spanish one’, if it’s indeed from French, and then with an unusual back-formation removing the (part-correctly) perceived French definite article to form a word that doesn’t exist in French!
  …otherwise, this is from Spanish, and is then also one of the vanishingly few Spanish words in Chinuk Wawa!

So you can see, there are a pretty good number of Métis/Canadian French words in what we linguists consider to be the Spokane Salish language. This is an umbrella term for the Lower, Middle, and Upper Spokane dialects and the Kalispel dialect, as well as the more divergent Pend d’Oreille / Montana Salish dialect, which I might wind up writing a separate installment about.

There were fur-trade establishments in the territories of these tribes by about 1810. With those forts and depots came alliances in the form of non-local male employees, the huge majority of them French-speakers, getting married to local Salish women and having obligations to their Salish in-laws.

Plenty of French vocabulary quickly caught on in the local languages, and was used for such a long time that it got re-analyzed by Salish speakers:

• see my notes about ‘molasses’ and ‘tea’,
• and note the nativization of la galette, with its foreign /g/ sound, into lqelét.

Please, let me know if you have a better French-language etymology for our puzzling word leyén ‘material; yardgoods’.

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?