French expressions that remind me of Chinook Jargon (Part 3: faire savoir)
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: Lawless French
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:
- faire savoir
And similar faire + infinitive verb expressions.
Faire savoir is an exact translation, a calque, for Chinook Jargon’s mamook-kumtuks (Northern spelling) / munk-kəmtəks (Southern spelling). In both languages, the construction means “inform” someone, “let them know”, and so on. (It’s also “teach” in Jargon, as an additional but not primary meaning.)
And for as far back in time as we have records of multi-part verb stems in Chinuk Wawa, there have been these mamook- / munk- expressions.
That’s only as far back as the Fort Vancouver era (say mid-to-late 1820s). But that “first creolization” is mighty far back in the known history of the language.
I take it that the Jargon has, for as long as it’s been a (francophone) Métis language, had these Causatives.
And it seems to be distinctly more common and frequent in French to form Causatives with the word for “do/make”, faire + Verb, than it’s ever been in English to say do + Verb/make + Verb.
In English, such forms are freighted with sociological overtones: of compulsion, status/power imbalances, and so on. When we say we “make someone do [Verb X]”, a synonym is that we’re forcing them to do so.
Not necessarily so in French, where faire + Verb really does just change Verb X’s valence, add an Agent participant, and other linguist-like things to say about the matter.
And I think “do/make” Causatives in English and French prefer to select a non-identical bunch of Verb X’s. In standard English, those who grow up talking it aren’t really comfortable saying something like “make them know”!
I’m not the world’s most fluent user of French, but it seems pretty clear that the faire + Verb construction is much more forgiving than that. I understand it to accept a quite broader range of Verb X’s, a fact which on its own would imply that the construction would have the vaguer, more grammaticalized sense that it indeed displays.
Recapping: don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying Father Le Jeune in the 1890s created Chinook Jargon’s mamuk + Verb formation! I am hinting that maybe the new Métis society of the lower Columbia River fur trade forts in the early 1800s did do so, with its approximately 50% component of speakers of Canadian French.
