Rounding out our thoughts on ’round’
Continuing our chronicle of “whole wheat” and Chinook Jargon as a Métis language:
In brief, Chinuk Wawa historically expresses “whole wheat” as “round wheat”, due to French-Canadian/Métis influence.
Image credit: Youtube
The original francophone expression being tout-rond, literally ‘all-round’.
This shows up in certain earlyish Jargon dictionaries as lúʔlu-saplél. That’s the “round wheat” I mentioned.
In his handwritten dictionary, based on personal experience of the Central Dialect back to about 1870, Louis-Napoléon St Onge has an entry for lúʔlu, which he spells lowlow.
St Onge translates this word into English as ’round’. No surprises there.
But he volunteers an etymology that shows he knew of Chinuk Wawa speakers’ reduplication strategy:
“From rond-rond.”
So St Onge is saying he understands lúʔlu to be a reduplication (a doubling, that is) of French rond, which is the masculine form of the adjective that means “round”.
(Fun fact, the feminine form of that word shows up in the name Grand(e) Ronde, in both western and eastern Oregon! It refers to a “Big Round” valley, which is la vallée in fur-trade era Métis/Canadian French, a feminine-gender word.)
What I would love to know is whether French-Canadians (here including speakers of the then-young Michif language) have really ever said rond-rond. I haven’t tumbled onto any evidence of them reduplicating full words yet. All I find is evidence that in their baby-talk, they reduplicated (single?) syllables, as in Chinuk Wawa’s bibi ‘kiss’.
My skepticism of St Onge’s insightful suggestion is also founded in my evaluation of the historic Central Dialect as not actually using very much reduplication. Here, it’s very useful to us to have the supremely well-documented Northern Dialect, where more or less the exact same tiny amount of reduplication goes on, largely confined to (in a Grand Ronde spelling) adverbs like qʰá-qʰa ‘here & there’ (literally ‘where-where’) and íxt-ixt ‘some (of them), a few (of them)’ (literally ‘one-one’). I’m having a hard time finding Central Dialect reduplicating verbs…
What I’m saying is that it’s clear St Onge had firsthand awareness of reduplication of full words happening in Chinook Jargon. He must have had the fairly accurate perception that it was descriptive words that got doubled in this way — anyhow, I see adverbs as being descriptors. I just think he made the tiny, but unwarranted, assumption that adjectives, too, got reduplicated in Chinuk Wawa.
Being a first-language French speaker, St Onge must have been aware of his language’s expressions(s) for “whole wheat”, and must have been working with that knowledge in coming up with his hypothesis of an etymology *rond-rond* for lúʔlu.
