Happy to announce the release of the map of Louisiana above. It is entirely in French, and presents the trading posts and military districts established during the colonial era, the names of Louisiana civil parishes, the seals of the State of Louisiana and the U.S., as well as the royal escutcheons of Kings Louis XIV of France & Navarre and Carlos III of Spain.
The coloration will make Roy G. Biv quite delighted, I should think.
I intentionally added French articles (le, la, les, l’) before some posts/districts and civil parishes. These usually correspond to locations named for local Native American nations or fauna/flora. In Louisiana French, those locations almost always use the plural article “les” (e.g. Les Opélousas). With the rise of international normative French taught in Louisiana schools, the influx of Francophone tourists from elsewhere, these articles usually (erroneously) get replaced with a singular article (e.g. L’Alabama instead of Les Alibamons), or no article is used, at all. Now no one can claim to not have known better. 🙂
From the pattern in the back mat, to the lettering and 3D effects around the letter, I literally built the map from scratch.
You can frame the map (I suggest white mat with black frame). I do not provide mat or frames.
Dimensions: 16×20
Paper stock: matte heavyweight poster paper
Lamination available (with matte surface)
Price: $25 + shipping
Order yours today for your classroom, office, home, or organization hall!
Those aren’t (and weren’t on the originals) plurals; they’re genitive case (possessives).
They should have ‘des’ before the word and ‘s’ on its end as in ‘Des Allemands’. This is also where the ‘s’ in Tchoupitoulas comes from.
The tribes were the Opelousa, Avoyelle, etc. Opelousas and Avoyelles comes from the longer versions ‘prairie of the Opelousas’ and ‘prairie of the Avoyelle’.
Hope this helps. —drew (professional linguist who studies Louisiana placenames as a hobby)
Drew: thanks for writing. We have in our possession hundreds of civil and parochial records, from the colonial and national periods, in French. You are right that, sometimes, possessive adjectives [des] were/are used. We see and still hear ample use of this in statements like “On a acheté ça des BREAUX” or “J’ai acheté de la terre des [sauvages] Atakapas.”
This is different from how articles are used in place names in French, however. Of course initially, the areas belonged to various nations and populations, which gave rise to the early possessive adjectives du, de la, des, and aux, which we see in phrases like “la nation des Alibamons.” But after time, those possessive adjectives transitioned into simple articles for place names. Hence, le Poste-des-Opélousas, le District-des-Attakapas, Commandement de la Fourche-des-Chétimachas, which in shortened form yields “les Opélousas,” “les Attakapas,” etc. We see this all over the Francophone, Hispanophone, and Lusophone world (e.g. Le Nouveau-Brunswick, Le Québec, Les Pays-Bas, La France, la Belgique, o Brasil, os Açores, and so on). It also exists in English (e.g. the Netherlands, the Gambia, the Cape, and so on).
In our case, by the end of the colonial period, trading posts and military districts, at least as far as the French and Spanish crowns were concerned, belonged to the crowns, not to the Native Americans for whom some of those regions were named. However unfair these may be, civil records also demonstrate representatives of the French and Spanish crowns purchasing land from Native American groups, and those lands came to retain the name of those groups after that purchase. This is why there was a commandant, a representative of the crown, holding legal, military, and ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the regions in question.
From that transition, we find literally hundreds of records of all kinds, written in French, where the French articles as seen on the maps above, are used. We also still use them in spoken French in Louisiana today. We also find those articles used in the headers and salutations of personal letters (in addition to official legal and ecclesiastical records) written in French in Louisiana (as well as in Spanish). When locational prepositions deriving from à or de are required, as you know, we contract them with the articles, giving rise to du, de la, des, au, à la, aux.
I’d be happy to point you to primary sources that can help you see the transition from possessive adjective to article to locational prepositions, which I detail above. Just let me know. A lot are now online, which makes it easier. – Christophe (a professional historian, genealogist, fluent speaker and teacher of Louisiana languages, and language activist)
Hey Christophe
I see what you’re going for. One thing to keep in mind, and it’s purely semantic, is that when they used the genitive for placenames, they weren’t actually expressing ownership (for the various reasons you’ve already mentioned), but rather describing places in the same way we’d use “…of x” in English. This is why you also, aside from the native tribes, see things like Rapides which of course refers to the rapids above Alexandria but which also didn’t infer ownership of that region by that geographic feature.
You see a slightly different usage that is similar in translations in which a lative/ablative meaning is given. This is most common with labelling of bayous and rivers on the older colonial and early American maps with their being simply given the name of the place or people they lead to and from. Most of these have been given new names since with very little record of the original inhabitants surrounding them left aside from these cartographic sources.
One thing that’s linguistically interesting is that sometimes the genitive from either the native language itself, or more commonly from Mobilian Jargon (the common native trade language at the time) gets used instead of or alongside the French. This results in a few peculiarities in which names that are in essence the same took very different routes toward their modern forms so that most would have no clue there could be a connection. Some examples:
Ouachita and Catahoula with the former used for the tribe, parish, and river but the latter used for lake (this one’s probably the most challenging to see the pattern in because both forms have been victims of terrible transliterations followed by sloppy translations of those transliterations, and because we’ve since dropped the s from the end of both);
Another that is an example of parallel French and native genitives obscured by bad spelling but in this case with much greater geographic distance between them is that of Tensas and Tangipahoa. They both refer to the same people, the Tensa indians but got mutilated in different ways. Both started out as Tænsi (with the æ sounding like the a in ‘cat’, a hard voiceless s, and the i like the i in ‘it’. The French were the first to map out where the settlements of these tribes in most of the state were and thus used ‘[des] Tænsas’ (and I’d imagine following your pattern discussed above, ‘les Tænsas’) with this name appearing on maps around the southshore of New Orleans, and then up the Mississippi into Arkansas, usually on the western side. The Spanish were the first to encounter this same tribe’s smaller handful of villages on the northshore with their transliteration being Tænzi. They however adopted the suffix -pao (most likely a genitive from the Tænsas’ own language or at least from the dialect of that language spoken by Tænsas on the eastern side of the Mississippi as the Spanish derivation can be found in Illinois too) giving them Tænzipao which later shows up as Tanzipao, Tængipao, and Tangipao but with the pronunciation they were attempting to transliterate being the same as the French were doing with Tænsas for the root and a separate ‘pa’ (a as in ‘ah’) and ‘o’ (o as in ‘oh’).
Different cartographers struggled to figure out their own way of getting this pronunciation across and really mangled the word in the process. First, several added an a onto the final o to emphasise that the o was not part of an ‘ao’ diphthong, yielding Tænzipaoa / Tængipaoa. Then, English cartographers inserted an h between the two vowel sounds which was a common manner of signifying such separation in English at the time so that the already etymologically damaged Tængipaoa became Tængipahoa. As happened across most European languages which used it, the letter æ later was replaced with just an ‘a’ (in English but sometimes an ‘e’ in French as in Tænas -> Tensas) so that we ended up with our modern form of Tangipahoa. That current form, with it’s just plain ugly modern pronunciation, is now so very distantly removed from its etymological equal Tensas, that even the parish’s own website incorrectly tries to translate the modern form into an approximation of Acolapissa meaning something like ‘ear of corn’.
Tickfaw in which ‘faw’ is the native morpheme for ‘the people’ (as in their word for themselves), but then we had ‘Flueve des Faus’ (and variously spelt faws and fause, but originally never fausse) and its early English variant Faw’s River. Tickfaw survived with the native form intact but with most perceiving no connection to whomever the ‘tick’ people were.
The other name though is better known but with most people having reanalysed it to have an entirely different meaning with a resulting erroneous misspelling to match. Some decades after it first appears on maps, Faw’s River becomes cut off from its mother waterway so that this ‘river’ becomes merely an oxbow. No longer being a fully fledged river, this led those hearing the names in either french or English to assume they were hearing something else entirely, thus taking “Flueve des Fause (river of the indians)” to “Flueve des Fausse (false river)” and the correlating “Faw’s River (indian’s river)” to “False River”, the name we use today.
——
In the end, it’s all interesting and many seemingly disparate placenames are connected to each other, but many more are just plain wrong in their current forms today.
(beautiful map, btw)