Page:New Brunswick Magazine Issue 1.djvu/381

the suggestions which have recently appeared have thus been made before.

At the time of the first discussion I have referred to, I was too young to take any deep interest in it, although I can recall something of what was said concerning it by those immediately about me, and of the opinions they entertained. When, several years afterwards, the question arose again, I sought rather carefully to find a satisfactory solution. And I could discover no form of the word which appeared a better one than aboideau: I came to the conclusion that this form is a condensation of the somewhat pleonastic expression "l abbé d' eau." Abée is a well-established old French word, whose meaning is a mill-dam, or, simply, a dam It is, probably, the basis of our law-term abeyance, which appears in Norman French as abbaiaunce; and it is obviously a better foundation for that word than the verb bayer, which has for its chief meaning to gape; to look for a long time at a thing with one's mouth open. In law, as in popular usage, abeyance signifies a state of suspension, or condition like that of a stream whose flow has been interrupted by a dam. Abée might by an easy and regular stage of transition come from abai, and,—the ai having oi for its equivalent in sound in the older speech,—our phrase would be in its original form, "l' aboi d' eau;" and being compressed with the articles omitted, aboideau.

The suggestion that this form of the word comes from the phase "une boîte d'eau," or "a la boîte d'eau"—"at the water-box"—is of no value, since it is plain from Diéreville's account of the Bay of Fundy dykes—in which account occurs the first description we have of what he calls, or what he says the Acadians called, aboteaux—that the name was given to the whole structure of the dam, and not to the sluice alone. Besides, in the French of two hundred years ago the word