POSTPONED

It is impossible to address contact literature in New France without dealing with the question of indigenous languages, the learning of which, an essential necessity for missionaries, adventurers and traders alike, presented many challenges. Paul Lejeune, Gabriel Sagard, Marie de l’Incarnation, to name a few, highlighted the difficulties they faced in mastering the country’s idioms. Their writings, like those of many of their contemporaries, are dotted with Native American expressions and terms which aim sometimes to accredit their testimonies, sometimes to reflect the linguistic reality of the Other, sometimes to reproduce an untranslatable local reality in French , sometimes to demonstrate a linguistic competence sometimes inflated for propaganda purposes. However, whatever the motivations of the authors, the Native American terms, unique traces of real or manufactured interethnic exchanges, cause problems of interpretation due to transcription errors, dialect variations from one clan to another, the rudimentary understanding or the deficient ear of the Europeans, even the deceit of the interpreters through whom the conversations were often reported. To all these pitfalls was added the imperfection of dictionaries and small vocabularies made available to travelers of the time.

The projected workshop is intended to be a research laboratory to explore avenues of reading and to raise questions about the meaning and the use of Native American xenisms in a vast corpus made up of travel or stay relationships, correspondences, missionary chronicles, diplomatic speeches, as well as bilingual lexicons and repertoires of sentences or prayers.

Please submit your intervention proposals in French or English to Marie-Christine Pioffet (mpioffet@yorku.ca) and Sylvie Rosienski-Pellerin (rosienski@glendon.yorku.ca) before February 1, 2020.