238 THE AMERICAN MOOSE 



Some of the French explorers in Canada found 

 there fishermen who had come from the Basque 

 country of southern France. Meeting the animal 

 now known as the moose, and never having seen 

 the European elk, these fishermen called the 

 moose by the Basque word for deer — orenac. 

 From this is derived orignac, orignal, words used 

 by French writers to designate 'Telan d'^Ame- 

 riqueJ'^ A well-known American writer on natural 

 history makes orignal an equivalent of original^ 

 signifying ''un type,'' or an animal of a newly- 

 found species. But derivations cannot be estab- 

 lished by guesswork. The Basques, untrained 

 in zoology, in calling the moose orenac, or " deer, " 

 were doing as well as they could under the circum- 

 stances. The name at least distinguished the 

 moose from the other species of the deer family 

 which were met by the explorers. 



Liberties are taken with the names of others 

 of the deer tribe. The Chief Game Guardian of 



tien Rasle, the French missionary who compiled a dictionary of the 

 Abnaki language late in the seventeenth century, interprets ''orignal'* 

 by the word mas. Fr. Rasle employed a character something like the 

 figure 8 to denote this vowel sound. He calls this a guttural oii {oo)^ 

 "sounded wholly from the throat, without any motion of the lips," 

 and adds that in the case of this om he was unable to imitate closely 

 the Indian pronunciation. — See Memoirs of the American Academy 

 oj Arts and Sciences, New Series (Cambridge, 1833), vol. i., pp. 495, 567, 

 570. 



3 Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire Universel. 



