Central dialect: ‘expiration’ & ‘boundary’ in St Onge’s handwritten dictionary
The absolutely great 2012 Chinuk Wawa dictionary from Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde taught me the noun ubút, meaning ‘end; goal’.
pi chxí álta nayka kə́mtəks (that was the first I’d heard of it).
Voyage au bout de la nuit (image credit: Amazon)
The totally wonderful 1870-ish handwritten dictionary of L-N St Onge that I’m working on, wanting to publish it, turns out to give us more to work with.
The word comes from a Métis/Canadian French phrase au bout, ‘at the end’.
(I guess not ‘to the end’, as that might be better put as jusqu’au bout. However, there’s also “Voyage au bout de la nuit“!)
It’s one of the extremely few — dare I say rare — Chinook Jargon words that comes from a French “prepositional phrase”.
Showing us that he knew the word well, in both of the characteristic North American pronunciations of it (with & without “t”), St Onge has these 2 entries, with somewhat differing senses:
- opu ‘expiration’
- opūt ‘boundary’
I was pleased to find confirmation that this word has been around in Chinuk Wawa for quite some time!
