French expressions that remind me of Chinook Jargon (Part 2: ‘always’)
I do a good deal of research work on Father JMR Le Jeune’s notebooks. They’re mostly in his first language, European French (from Brittany).
Image credit: Genius
Le Jeune was of course a supremely fluent speaker of Northern-Dialect Chinook Jargon, and the creator of the CJ newspaper Kamloops Wawa (1891-1918, let’s say).
Engaging with both of these languages that Le Jeune thought in, I find that a number of recurring expressions strongly resonate between the two.
Today’s example:
- toujours + Verb for ‘still’ Verb-ing
Toujours means ‘always’. You’ll find it used in what we English speakers perceive as additional senses: ‘to keep on’ doing, and ‘still’ doing. Example:
L’évêque s’étonne de recevoir toujours par les journaux des nouvelles des sauvages…
‘The bishop is surprised to keep receiving via the newspapers, news of the Native people…’
As it happens, at least the Northern Dialect of Chinook Jargon does these same things with the word for ‘always’, which we spell kwanisum in our BC Learners Alphabet. There, kwanisum immediately followed by a verb can mean ‘continue…; still…; keep on…’ Example:
Kwanisum yaka mitlait kopa naika.
‘It’s still with me.’
It makes me think of kwanisum as sort of another prefix in the North.
I don’t find traces of this usage in the 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary (Southern Dialect). There, kwánsəm always seems to mean ‘all the time’, as in ‘habitually, characteristically’.
For a view into the oldest regional version, the Central Dialect, I combed through the Demers, Blanchet, & St Onge 1871 dictionary (etc.), where kwanesom also sticks to the basic sense of ‘always; all of the time’.
So, it may be that this is an additional way that the Northern Dialect has innovated grammatically. I had not yet spotted this when I wrote my dissertation about a decade ago.
