origin of tJie name ^ Canada.^ 431 



for, but it is not." Yet there have not been wanting attempts to 

 account for what the learned Dean justly regards as still needing 

 explanation ; and the present paper is intended briefly to recount 

 such attempts, and also to submit a new conjecture, not so much 

 with the idea of fully satisfying as of directing inquiry. 



Among the curious, who have investigated the early history o^ 

 Canada, some have sought a native origin for the name, and 

 others a foreign one. 



1. Those who hold the name to be aborio-inal derive it from the 

 Iroquois language, or rather from a dialect of the same spoken by 

 the Onondagoes, who (as we gather from the Archoeologia Amer- 

 icana^ vol. ii. p. 320) call a town or village ganataje or Jcanathaje^ 

 while the corresponding words in other Iroquois dialects are said 

 to be carhata and andate (among the Wyandots) nekantaa, (am- 

 ong the Mohawks) and iennekanandaa (among the Senecas). 

 It is supposed that Jacques Cartier, who first entered the St. Law- 

 rence in 1535 and discovered the interior of the country, and in 

 whose narrative the name * Canada' first occurs, but without any ex- 

 planation, might have heard the natives use the Iroquois word? 

 in one of the above forms, when speaking of their primitive village, 

 then called Stadacona, which stood near Quebec, and that he might 

 have mistaken it^for the name of the country and adopted it ac- 

 cordingly without note or comment."^ And this is the explanation 

 which appears now to find most favour ; and though not satisfied 

 with it myself, I must add that it is somewhat supported — as it has 

 struck me — by the analogy of another term, namely Canuc, which 

 is used vulgarly and rather contemptuously for Canadian, and 

 which seems to me to come from Canuchsha, the word employed 

 by the Iroquois to denote a * hut ' (see Arch. Americana, vol. ii. p. 

 322). Here a Canadian would mean a * townsman ' or ' villager', 

 but a canuc would be only a 'hutter', 



2. Others have thought Canada to be a Spanish or Portuguese 



* Cartier gives in his vocabulary Candata as the name for village in 

 the Algonquin tongue of Stadacona. In a M.S. dictionary of the 

 Ottawa language in the Library of McGill College, village is repre- 

 sented by the word outenau^ and house is ouikwam, the same with the 

 Micmac wigwam, used in Nova Scotia. The word for hut in this diction- 

 ary is ouachj which is perhaps the first syllable of Hochelaga, the ancient 

 name of Montreal ; though it is also possible that this name may b© 

 derived from ouatchioua^ mountain or precipice. — (Eds.) 



