‘Gun dirt’: A partly Nootka Jargon etymology for púlali?
How about this new idea about a real old Chinuk Wawa word?
Gun dirt! (Image credit: some FB page)
The linguistically gifted Astorian fur trader Alexander Ross’s 11th item in his ‘mixed dialect’ vocabularyl list is poll-alley for ‘(lead) balls (that you shoot out of a gun)’.
Contrast his te-whoot for ‘powder’, which is from Chinookan words for that concept.
This is Chinook Jargon’s púlali for ‘powder’, which is “of obscure origin” (Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary 2012).
It can’t be wholly from Nootka Jargon, as Nuuchahnulth lacks /l/.
Thus presumably it’s at least in part < Lower Chinookan, and either a noun or a locative adverb, because many of the latter end in /li/ in Chinookan.
Conceivably it’s:
(A) < LC */púl-(ə)li/ ~ /pul·(ə)l-li/ ‘in the dark (stuff; mud?)’ (Boas 1910:602 glosses the root as ‘night; darkness’), cf. LC /ú-pul/ ~ /ú-pul·l/ ‘night’ (Boas 1894:29 and 11 respectively, the latter variant displaying final-sonorant reduplication typical of ideophones, cf. Boas 1910:627ff although missing from the list there), as well as #17 in Ross’s list.
or
(B) an otherwise unattested Nootka Jargon-Chinook Jargon modifying noun + head noun compound (thus another phrasal datum and having the same syntax as later CJ): NJ poo ‘gun’ + CJ iliʔi ‘soil’ as in other words recorded by Franchere and by Ross, perhaps soon reanalyzed in LC as containing the adverbial suffix mentioned. “Gun dirt”!
Later CJ is púlali ‘powder, sand, gunpowder’.
So there’s a quick new idea about the hitherto mysterious source of pulali.
It’s a bit bold, as is dares to think that elements we know separately from NJ and CJ might have combined with one another.
Oh, right, there are countless examples of NJ’s mamuk- , chako-, hayas-, and so forth becoming inflections on CJ nouns and verbs!
I don’t know if Alexander Ross’s translation of pulali as ‘balls’ is a mistake, or reflects very early Chinook Jargon.
(A much better known word for ‘balls’ is shat, from English ‘shot’.)
𛰅𛱁𛰃𛱂 𛰙𛱁𛱆𛰅𛱁 𛰃𛱄𛰙𛰃𛱄𛰙? qʰáta mayka tə́mtəm?
kata maika tumtum? Qu’en penses-tu?
What do you think?
And can you say it in Chinuk Wawa?
Hey! Teach Yourself northern-dialect Chinook Jargon!
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Contact me for the Zoom link.
I always assumed pulali was from French.
In Laverdure & Allard’s Michif dictionary it says p. 119:
gunpowder—la poudr a feezee, la poudr; Shot gun shells contain gunpowder. La poudr ashtayw daw lee grous kartoush.
I always thought pulali was from Québec French ‘poudrerie’. Dictionaries say:
(1) fabrique de poudre
(2) blizzard, neige fine poussée par le vent (Canada)
The Michif word for ‘blizzard’ is spelled poudiree, phonetically /pudirii/. (p. 45)
The stress of the first syllable in CW is not expected, though. Otherwise an obvious source.
To tell just one of my objections to a French etymology for púlali (link: see my previous thoughts on it), Alexander Ross’s quite early vocabulary of Chinuk Wawa has no other francophone items whatsoever. It would appear the Jargon was still a sort of élite language, of the chiefs and the fur companies’ “gentlemen”. Once it became a more proletarian idiom, which it did in the blink of an eye as a Pacific NW Métis community formed around Fort Astoria, the really considerable Canadian component took strong root. Alexander Ross of course spoke excellent country French with the workingmen, so the only reason I can readily imagine for him perhaps omitting French-sourced items from his vocabulary might be that his readers would already know those words. (Just as later published vocabularies of Chinook Jargon demonstrably left out English-sourced words.) So, then, it would be bizarre for him to include just 1 supposedly francophone item, púlali. And he does include some anglophone-sourced material, such as shippo, which we might have expected him to leave out on the same proposed principle. All in all, for me púlali is in the same category of Jargon words whose etymologies are mysterious as sáliks and saplél.
That would be pretty amazing, if it really meant “gunpowder” first and later any powder or dust. I can see that development. A bold theory, as you said yourself.