Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 5:37 PM
To: Gordy Hill
Subject: Emailing: snye
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Verminâs Snye is a fictional location in the game of Everquest, a Dungeon-like computer game. Snye also dots the map of Canada from Quebec to Alberta. Hereâs a Canadian word with a root leading back to Egyptian hieroglyphics and to cuneiform tablets of ancient Babylon. The root of the word snye is certainly 6,000 years old, probably much older. Wordwise, that is ancestry!
In the Canadian English dialect of the Ottawa Valley, and now in many other parts of Canada and in a few localities in the United States, a snye is a side-water channel that rejoins a larger river, creating an island, and sometimes conveniently providing canoeists passage around turbulent rapids or around a waterfall. The word is an Englishing of the QuÃbÃcois French chenail, âchannel.â Chenail is an Acadian dialect form of the standard continental French word for water channel, chenal. Snye is spelled the way it is in Canadian English because it imitates the Quebec pronunciation of chenail, which is shneye, to rhyme with eye. Because the second syllable of chenail is stressed hard, in rapid colloquial speech the unstressed first syllable of chenail tends to almost disappear, hence the pronunciation shneye. It is common in many languages for unstressed syllables to be shortened, often shortened out of existence. A Short Detour down the Road to Schwa This neutral vowel sound of unstressed syllables even has a fancy name in linguistics; it is a schwa. Schwa is an excellent Scrabble word. Schwa entered English from German where it was a German attempt to reproduce the Hebrew word sheva, the name of one of the "points" or nikaydot in Hebrew. Points are the orthographical means by which vowel sounds are represented in many Semitic languages. Sheva is a double-dot subliteral that, when placed under a Hebrew consonant, indicates no following vowel sound or a short neutral vowel sound, a schwa. An example of a schwa in English is the second syllable of the word sofa. Pronounced loosely in common North American English speech, sofa sounds like âSOH-fuh.â The fuh is a schwa, that is, all that remains of a poor little unstressed terminal a. Now letâs follow the circuitous but fascinating journey this word snye has taken through six thousand years. Weâll use a symbol in linguistics, borrowed from mathematics. In reference to words and word roots, the symbol < means âderives from,â âis descended from.â Canadian English snye < Quebec French chenail âwater channelâ < French chenal âchannelâ< Latin canalis âwater-pipe,â âlarge ditch,â âgrooveâ < Latin canna âcane,â âreedâ < Greek kanna âhollow reed.â The Proto-Indo-European root *kann meant âreedâ or âhemp plant.â Is there an echo of that root in the word cannabis, hemp plant? Yes! So Greek may have inherited its reed word kanna from the ancient mother tongue of most European languages, Proto-Indo-European. Or, perhaps more likely, the Greeks borrowed their kanna from one of many sources in the ancient Middle East. Compare a Biblical Hebrew word for âreed,â qaneh. Look at an Arabic word for âreed,â qanah. Go back farther to the cuneiform inscriptions of ancient Babylon and find the common Akkadian word for âreed,â kanÃ. Egyptian hieroglyphics have a generic word for âreed of the River Nile,â ganu. Many Canadian Place Names Use the Word Snye Brandon, Manitoba has its Snye River. Three Snye Rapids
gurgle near Parry Sound, Ontario. Canada âs oil-and-tar-sands hub in
northern Alberta is Fort McMurray. Fort McM. has Canada âs best known
instance of this geographic word, locally named The Snye Water Park, âa
waterway that once linked the Clearwater River to the Athabasca River.
Many private and commercial air charter companies utilize the Snye for
their float base operations. In order to provide travel to the resulting
island, named MacDonald Island, In southwestern Ontario, the St. Clair River has Snye Channel. It forms the eastern boundary of Walpole and St. Anneâs Island First Nations Territory, and empties into Lake St Clair. Hereâs an old postcard from 1914 showing a ferry on the snye at Wallaceburg, Ontario.
If you have ever skated breezily along Ottawa âs frozen Rideau Canal, you may know, as a guide states, that âthe canal channel was originally a natural depression in the riverbank, known locally as the âOxford Snye.â Colonel By â Ottawa âs first name was Bytown, named after the colonel â excavated the snye and used the dug material to build the embankment. This was done to prevent water from the canal channel from entering the natural river course.â In British Columbia âs Fort Simpson Territorial Park, many species of birds use âThe Snyeâ as a nesting area. âThe Snye is a shallow wetland ecosystem located between the main portion of the community and the southern shoreline of the river. Many species of migratory waterfowl may be seen in season, including tundra swans and snow geese.â So ends our trip along the snye-like, watery path this Canadian word has taken as it has meandered through our history and through 6,000 previous years of world history.
 2006 William Gordon Casselman
Hundreds of links to more of my word entries are available below.
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