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Apr. 13th, 2011 09:04 pm
TOODON̄ANĀSKUS!
Poor Nuphy hurried me off the phone so he could curl up with a Maigret mystery, but not before playing detective for me himself. As you may recall, my textbook for learning Cajun French is an idiosyncratic work by a high school teacher from Vermilion Parish. And one of its most curious features is the orthography, which is "based on English" in the same way as those kludgy respellings we had in a juvenile magazines at school. It's really quite valuable, as once you get used to its quirks, you have a very accurate record of the pronunciation of an actual Louisiana French dialect.
The downside is that it can take some ingenuity to decode the etymological roots of some of the words he gives. For instance, one that still has me puzzled is "shah ton̄ yā" (in IPA [ʃatɔ̃je]), which he glosses as "dandelion". The Standard French spelling would be something like chategner or chatogner, either which resembles a regional variants of châtaigner "chestnut". But the übercomprehensive Dictionary of Louisiana French has no such entry, and the only equivalent it gives for "dandelion" in the English-French section is pissenlit.
Reading the list of "Common Expressions" last weekend, I came up against this stumper: "Sahl o pree!" He glosses it as "Doggonit!" and it comes right between "Sah t'ahmuz?" (Ça t'amuse?) and "Saw sah tør gahrd paw" (Ça ça te regarde pas) so I naturally tried to read the first syllable as Ça. But where to go from there? "Pree" could represent pris, so![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu and I wondered if the tail of the phrase was au pris. But then where's the verb? Nuphy, bless him, solved it immediately, "Oh, saloperie!" It never occurred to me to read it as a single word, but it makes perfect sense. And the DLF has three entries for this, the last of which is:
Speaking of interjections, I'm kind of surprised to see foutre so weakened in Cajun usage. I know that it's not even as strong as "damn" to the Parisians any more, but I expected more conservatism from Americans. In the DLF, however, pas un foutre is glossed as "not at all, not one bit; nothing at all" and foutu merely as "ruined, beyond hope, done for". There's also the curious collocation foutre le camp, but that's for another time.
The downside is that it can take some ingenuity to decode the etymological roots of some of the words he gives. For instance, one that still has me puzzled is "shah ton̄ yā" (in IPA [ʃatɔ̃je]), which he glosses as "dandelion". The Standard French spelling would be something like chategner or chatogner, either which resembles a regional variants of châtaigner "chestnut". But the übercomprehensive Dictionary of Louisiana French has no such entry, and the only equivalent it gives for "dandelion" in the English-French section is pissenlit.
Reading the list of "Common Expressions" last weekend, I came up against this stumper: "Sahl o pree!" He glosses it as "Doggonit!" and it comes right between "Sah t'ahmuz?" (Ça t'amuse?) and "Saw sah tør gahrd paw" (Ça ça te regarde pas) so I naturally tried to read the first syllable as Ça. But where to go from there? "Pree" could represent pris, so
monshu and I wondered if the tail of the phrase was au pris. But then where's the verb? Nuphy, bless him, solved it immediately, "Oh, saloperie!" It never occurred to me to read it as a single word, but it makes perfect sense. And the DLF has three entries for this, the last of which is:saloperie interj. son-of-a-gun, dog-gone it, oh shucks
Speaking of interjections, I'm kind of surprised to see foutre so weakened in Cajun usage. I know that it's not even as strong as "damn" to the Parisians any more, but I expected more conservatism from Americans. In the DLF, however, pas un foutre is glossed as "not at all, not one bit; nothing at all" and foutu merely as "ruined, beyond hope, done for". There's also the curious collocation foutre le camp, but that's for another time.
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