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“Et tu jases trop dans la salle de classe.”

 

Hello, Bill.  

Must admit, I’m a fan of your columns and your handle on language.  I’m in a little bit of a linguistic situation here. And I was wondering if you could help.  Now, I’m from the densely Acadien St. John River Valley, the American side — although I do have strong Canadian ties. I’m wondering if you would know what the correct spelling of the Acadian French verb jauser? It means: to speak with others in a group, or to loiter by talking, e.g., “Samedi soir Maman et toutes ses soeurs ont jausé jusqu’à trois heures.”

[Casselman translation: On Saturday night Mom and all her sisters blabbed away until three in the morning.]

Any thoughts you might have on the word are more than welcome.

Thank you, Dustin Martin

Dustin -

The verb, correctly spelled, is jaser.

The nouns are jaserie and jasette. The agent nouns are jaseur and jaseuse ‘blabbermouth or blat mouth,’ and the much rarer present participle is sometimes used as an adjective jasant, jasante ‘gabby, blabbing, yacking.’

In older continental French, jaser was once used of babies and meant “to babble.”

In Acadian French, jaser became a synonym of regular French verbs like causer ‘to talk a lot’  and bavarder ‘to jabber, to gossip’ and babiller.

In modern French it is still widely used, EXACTLY the way you are using it in Acadien.

e.g.  from current Larousse and le Petit Robert dictionaries:

jaser = to gossip, to blab, to chatter

Example from Parisian French:  ça va faire jaser dans le quartier. ‘That’s going to set tongues wagging all over the neighbourhood.’

 

In Norman Rockwell’s magazine cover, “Gossip”, an old woman starts a gossipy tale at the top left. The rumour spreads through town and in the last figure at the bottom right the same jaseuse is scolded by her husband. I think the gossip must have been about the husband!

 

Some Quebec Words

In Quebec French nowadays, it is not quite as insulting as the Acadien meaning. Today in Quebec, one can say piquer une jase ‘to have a nice little chat.’

la jase = jaserie  ‘talkativeness, being a blabbermouth’

Quebec sentence:  Elle a de la jasette!    “She sure talks a lot!”  

 

Etymology

The verb has been in French since 1500 CE. It began as a Norman-Picard verb gaser. It first meant ‘to utter repetitive bird calls’ as, for example, in the phrase: gaser ou jaser comme une pie borgne ‘to chatter like a one-eyed magpie.’

Jaser follows a semantic pattern common in Indo-European verbs of speaking. These verbs begin as simple descriptive verbs, sometimes colorful but of a positive meaning. Frequently however such verbs used over the centuries develop a pejorative sense, often a negative connotation that buries the positive sense completely. This has occurred in the verb jaser. It has nopositive meaning. It is exclusively used of blabbermouths and gossips now.

Another French verb of speaking that began positively and ended in a chiefly negative meaning is causer ‘to chat, to prattle, to gossip.’ It began in Late Latin as causari (perhaps from an earlier causare) and in the earliest French causer with a serious legal meaning ‘to prepare a case at law,’ ‘to discuss the structure of a law case,’ ‘to plead the merits of a case’ or ‘to dispute a case.’ Although it can still be used in a phrase like causer politique ‘to talk politics’, it is far more usual in modern French for causer to mean only ‘to blab.’ Une causerie is an informal talk in front of an audience, rather than a planned and written speech.These verbs of speaking begin meaning things like ‘talk’ or ‘talk quickly’ and then tend to come to mean something negative like “blab all day long”  or “flap your lips like a parched walrus.”

In other words, they become verbs to put down someone who talks too much, at least according to a listener describing the way someone else talks.

 

 

For readers interested in French, there is a great deal of material on my website about Quebec French. Just click below to begin.

 

 

My books of Canadian Sayings (previewable on my website by clicking on Books to Sample just under the title at the top of this page) contain hundreds of French Canadian expressions, some of which are of Acadien origin.

 

© 2009 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

Any comments, emendations, additional word lore?

Please email it to me at

canadiansayings@mountaincable.net