270 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



I find it next in a document of 1702 as PECOUDIAK, which, in view of its later 

 forms, I take to be a misprint for PETCOUDIAK (Rameau de Saint-Pere, Une 

 Colonie Féodale, II, 335). Later, and especially in connection with the troubles 

 which culminated in the Expulsion of the Acadians, the name finds very frequent 

 mention in documents and upon maps, in a great variety of forms, e.g., PETKOUD- 

 IAK, PITCOUDIACK, PATCOOTYEAK, PETKOUTIEK, PATCOUTIEUK, 

 PITCORDIAC, PITSCORDIAC, and others, with many misprinted forms, such as 

 PELCOUDIAK, and DELKEKOUDIACK. A complete collection of the spellings 

 would number perhaps two-score. In the French documents, however, there is a 

 marked tendency to use the form PETCOUDIAC, or some form very close thereto, 

 and this type survived the French period in official documents and maps, and came 

 into use in those of the English, e.g., as PETCODIACK on a land grant of 1765, 

 PETCUDIAC on Des Barres' Charts of about 1780, and in the Morse Report on 

 Nova Scotia of 1784 (Report on Canadian Archives, 1884, xxxiii); and it is either 

 PETCUDIAC or PETCOUDIAC upon all of the Provincial maps,— by Bonnor, 

 Lockwood, Baillie, and others, down to Saunders' of 1842, which has PETACODIAC. 

 Meantime, however, two other forms of spelling had originated in the early English 

 documents. One of the two begins with the PETTCOCHACK in the very literal 

 Journal of Captain William Pote, of 1745, 53, although misapplied to the Washade- 

 moak, while later English maps and documents have PETQUECHOK or some 

 closely similar form; and this represents obviously that local pronunciation of the 

 English sailors and rivermen, uninfluenced by any efforts to be documentarily cor- 

 rect, which has come down to our day in the form noted above as PETTY-COAT- 

 JACK. The other contemporaneously-originating type of the word is more im- 

 portant, since it powerfully influenced our present usage. It appears exclusively 

 in English official documents. I find it first in a document of 1738 as PETITCOU- 

 TIAK (Nova Scotia Archives, III, 221), though I suspect somewhat the precise ac- 

 curacy of the printing. It does, however, occur as PETITCOODIAC and PETIT- 

 COODIACK in grants of land of 1765, preserved among the records at Fredericton, 

 —while as PETICOODIAC and PETICOODIACK it reappears frequently there- 

 after in many records, being PETITCOUDIACK on Sproule's fine map of 1786, 

 (these Transactions, VII, 1901, ii, 412). Meantime there appears (I have noticed it 

 first in a grant of 1765 mentioned above), a tendency to change the OO into O, making 

 the word PETICODIAC or PETITCODIAC, instead of PETITCOODIAC, and 

 this form gradually came to prevail. Now this final form of the word presents 

 three interesting features as compared with the French PETCOUDIAC or equiv- 

 alent from which it is descended; first, it has acquired a syllable, after the first, 

 very obviously under stress of easier pronunciation by English tongues; second, it 

 has changed the OO sound into O, also through greater ease of pronunciation, the 

 sound CODE being more familiar to the English than COOD; and third, it has ac- 

 quired the anomaly of a consonant, the second T, which is absolutely silent in pro- 

 nunciation. The origin of this T seems to me, however, perfectly obvious. Appearing 

 only in English documents in the name of a place long under rule of the French and 

 therefore associated with them, and happening to be pronounced, as to its first 

 syllables, like the French word PETIT, that spelling was adopted either through 

 simple associative suggestion, or else in the belief that the word really did involve 

 the French PETIT. However this may have been at first, later the belief that the 

 word contains PETIT became prevalent, for the form PETIT CODIACK (as two 

 words), appears as early as 1781, in the Journal of Henry Alline, recurs on Wright's 

 map of 1790, and finds definite expression in 1849 by Gesner, who, in his Neu< Bruns- 

 wick, 137, says that the word is derived from the French PETIT COUDE, — a 



