“ashnu”/”shenu” is definitely not a normal word!
I had thought the Northern-Dialect Chinook Jargon word ashnu ‘to kneel’ was an anomaly…My reasoning was that it seemed to come from not one, but 2 words, unlike the vast majority of verbs in the language.
Image credit: Black Sunflowers Poetry Press
Those 2 words that I was excavating underneath ashnu were the French phrase à genoux,‘on (one’s) knees; kneeling’.
It’s true that those 2 words are down there.
But, did I dig too far at first?
The more immediate source of the Northern-Dialect word ashnu might be, we could think, a French single-word verb formed from those 2 words — (s’)agenouiller, ‘to kneel’.
Now, I don’t know how common that verb has historically been in North American French. I don’t find it in Albert Valdman’s “Dictionary of Louisiana French”, which instead has se mettre (d’)à genoux — literally ‘to put oneself on one’s knees’. Perhaps (s’)agenouiller has been a rare verb on this continent, making it a poor candidate for the ancestor of ashnu.
But, the major problem with considering this French single-word verb as an etymology is that we would expect the specific form of it that Chinuk Wawa took in to be either:
- the formal/plural command form agenouillez(-vous)!,
- or the singular command form agenouille(-toi)!
Both of those are problematic. The plural imperative has at least one syllable too many (/ye/) to have provided us with the form ashnu, and the singular one has at least one consonant sound too many at the end, /y/.
(The same issue of an excess syllable would occur with a French infinitive source, s’agenouiller. And, Chinuk Wawa verbs derived from French virtually never can be shown to come from infinitives. This makes sense. How often do you say an infinitive all by itself to someone? What circumstances is that even imaginable in? Not to mention that an infinitive source would be predicted to give a never-documented form like *sashnu(ye)…And CW hasn’t liked to borrow French reflexive verbs. Even French se marier ‘to get married’, had to lose its reflexive pronoun to join the Jargon club.)
These same analytical points apply, by the way, to the Southern-Dialect form of the Jargon verb, shenu.
Shenu is a nice clue for us, as it turns out: it clearly comes from a single-word noun, French genoux ‘knees’.
Aha!
All of this has the fingerprints of the French Catholic missionary priests on it.
It would appear that quite early on, perhaps back in 1838-1839 when Fathers Blanchet and Demers arrived at Fort Vancouver and hadn’t totally mastered Chinuk Wawa yet, they had a need to express an important religious concept that was then new in CW, kneeling. Certainly the evidence we have points to this word entering the Jargon at about that time.
Lacking deep Jargon resources, I infer that the priests relied on their own French, a language that some of the Métis families they were ministering to had an understanding of. It’s easy enough to point at someone’s knees and say, “Genoux!”, and/or to kneel to demonstrate “À genoux!”
I wouldn’t claim that this is any indication of a pidgin French existing in the world of Fort Vancouver. No such lingo has ever made an appearance, and none would be needed, because Chinook Jargon was already widely known there.
But, a pidgin-style strategy can easily have led to a foreign-sourced noun (or noun phrase) from the priests’ Canadian French becoming a verb in the mouths of fluent Pacific Northwest speakers of Chinook Jargon!
A clarifying reminder — I say ashnu/shenu is foreign-sourced because it appears to be “artificial”. Ashnu/shenu is unlike virtually all other French words in Jargon, which follow a demonstrable pattern of coming from PNW Métis families’ daily usage of (more grammatical!) French.
Bonus fact 1:
If my guess about the archaeological dating of ashnu/shenu is correct, this means we have here one of those incredibly rare instances where a word in a given language can be traced back to the influence of a single person or persons.
Bonus fact 2:
The Métis heritage language Michif (mixed French & Cree) is of little to no help here. All dictionaries give, as we’d expect, a Cree-sourced verb for ‘kneel’.
Michif tends to be more help to us Chinookers when it comes to nouns and adjectives — in fact almost any type of word except verbs tends to be from a French source in Michif.
