Why 2 pronunciations of ‘shingle’?
The excellent Grand Ronde Tribes 2012 dictionary of Chinuk Wawa has libárədu for a ‘shingle’. With 4 syllables.
Image credit: Energy Kingston Exteriors
But we also find this pronunciation of the same Jargon word, from George Gibbs 1863:
< Le-báh-do > (often pronounced < lab’-a-do >), n. French, LE BARDEAU.
A shingle.
That’s with only 3 syllables!
I would venture that both pronunciations were traditional in the lower Columbia River region.
It’s often highly worth our while to look into dictionaries of Michif, which in some ways is the sister Métis language of Chinook Jargon. There, we find pronunciations of the ‘shingle’ word as li bardoo.
Now, that’s a pretty much phonetic writing of the word — so it’s showing us that the /r/ is pronounced in traditional Canadian/Métis usage. It’s fairly strongly trilled, in the kind of description that you’ll often encounter.
So I think the acoustic impression of that traditional way of saying the word, out here in the Pacific Northwest, to speakers of Chinuk Wawa and other non-French languages, may well have been sometimes [libarədu]. — With an “intrusive” schwa sound. An extra syllable!
I invite your hypotheses.
I had thought that usually, a French /r/ at the end of a syllable like the .bar. in le bardeau got lost on its way into Chinook Jargon. That does seem to be true with most /r/’s at the ends of words, for instance in lapikʰwo ‘frock, short coat’, from l’habit court [labikur].
But in the Jargon we do find preserved French /r/ in “coda” syllabic position, when it’s just before another consonant. From the Grand Ronde dictionary, just think of these:
- laparp ‘beard’ < la barbe
- larp ‘kinnikinnik’ < l’herbe
- lapʰort ‘door’ (~ lapot) < la porte
- lemartʰo ‘hammer’ < le marteau
- likart ‘cards’ <les cartes
- also lolsh ‘barley’ < l’orge
In fact, I have a hard time finding many instances where the French syllable-final /r/ that’s followed by another consonant was always dropped in Jargon! There’s these three apparent examples in the GR dictionary:
- lapʰish ‘pole’ < la perche
- lapʰushet ‘fork’ < la fourchette
- letʰosho ‘rag’ < le torchon
All 3 of these are in the separate “older/regional” words section, for what it’s worth. I could wonder whether the Métis/Canadian French pronunciation influence became especially concentrated and potent in later decades, when the Jargon was a main language of Grand Ronde Reservation. It’s no coincidence that English words, too, started tending to retain their /r/ during the rez period.
Typically, we have words retaining the /r/, or those such as lapo(r)t ‘door’ where there’s variation between a pronunciation with the /r/ and one without the /r/. Two pronunciations. As also seen with our libá(rə)du ‘shingle’!
So, I think we’ve explained things well enough. Syllable-final French /r/ wasn’t always (or even terribly often) lost in Jargon, due to the ways Canadian/Métis people pronounced the relevant words.
