[ganong] INDIAN PLACE-NOMENCLATURE 439 



TEMISCOUATA. Name of a well-known large lake, affluent to the River 

 Saint John in southern Quebec. There are several explanations of the word, mostly 

 connected with Indian legends, but the termination suggests a probable connection 

 with -KA'DI- especially in the form KWA'DI. 



F. The origin of the Place-name A CAD IE or A CAD I A . 

 The foregoing account of the many Micmac place-names which 

 end in -acadie or its equivalent, recalls the fact that the very frequency 

 of this termination is generally supposed to have originated the 

 important word Acadie or Acadia, the name formerly applied by the 

 French to the present Provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and 

 Prince Edward Island, and still retained in historical and literary 

 usage. Widely accepted and very pleasing though this view certainly 

 is, it has yet no foundation in fact, as I believe the evidence amply 

 attests. This i^a suitable place in which to bring together the data 

 that bear on this interesting matter. 



First I shall trace the origin of the present belief. The very 

 earliest suggestion of a connection between the name Acadie and the 

 Micmac termination -acadie, the familiar combination so fully con- 

 sidered in the foregoing pages, occurs, so far as I can find, in 1825 in a 

 valuable little work published anonymously at Halifax, and entitled 

 A General Description of Nova Scotia. . . .a new edition Printed at 

 the Royal Acadian School. The first edition, published two years 

 earlier, I have not been able to see. In this work occurs the passage 

 already cited in this paper, viz.. 



The two largest rivers of Nova Scotia, are the Shubenacadie and the Annapolis. 

 The former, called by way of pre-minence [sic] Shubenacadie, or the River of Acadia, 

 (Shuben being the Indian name for a river) is very large, rapid and circuitous. 



Thus this passage, though much in error as already noted (page 

 424), does incidentally connect ^cac?fa with the termination -acadie of 

 the important Micmac place-name Shubenacadie. 



It was probably the suggestion thus given which influenced 

 Abraham Gesner, the geologist, in elaborating the complete acadie- 

 aka'di theory as it occurs in his book The Industrial Resources of Nova 

 Scotia, of 1849, pp. 2, 31, as follows; — 



In the Micmac Indian dialect âkâde signifies a place. Thus Anglishouâkàde 

 means a place where Englishmen reside, Wcnjouâkâde a place where French people 

 live, or a French settlement. The Shubenacadie is called by the natives Saagaaben- 

 âcâde, a place where their favourite root, the Sagaabun, grows; thus the origin of the 

 term Shubenacadie now applied to the river, where those roots were formerly very 

 abundant. The terms Cadie and L'Acadie have evidently been derived from the 

 Micmac âkâde — a place. 



Thus Gesner, in this passage, was the first, so far as 1 can find, 

 to actually publish the theory that the name Acadie is derived from the 

 frequent Micmac termination -aka'di. It was not he, however, who 

 was responsible for its wide dissemination and well-nigh universal 



Sec. I and II, 1915—29 



