Page:New Brunswick Magazine Issue 1.djvu/385

guese bota, the Italian botte, the Welsh botas, the Irish butats, and the English boot? Aboter then would mean to a-boot, or to put on a boot, or hopple, of any kind, and not necessarily one specially made of a billet of wood, a branch of a tree, or of a whole tree with its branches. And either boot or clog is a very clumsy name for a dyke.

Even after I had carefully read all that has appeared relating to the subject in the previous numbers of The New Brunswick Magazine, I adhered firmly to my long-standing opinion that the best, if not the only proper, form of the word employed by the Acadians was aboideau, and that it was derived from abée, a dam, in the manner I have above mentioned. When I informed the editor of the magazine of my intention to write something in support of my opinion, and expressed my regret that I had not found in Saint John a copy, in the original, of Diéreville's book on Acadie, which I had never seen, he kindly placed in my hands his copy of the edition published at Quebec in 1885 by L. U. Fontaine. From it I extracted the paragraph in reference to the Acadian dykes. And I was gratified at finding, quite unexpectedly, that M. Fontaine, in a note upon the word aboteau, says that it is a modification of the Celtic abée,—the word from which I had derived aboideau. But before I had sent to the editor my brief comments, I happened to be reading a page of French in which there met my eye abat-jour,—a word bearing the meaning, a sky-light. My attention being arrested by the first part of the compound, there occurred to me at once the other architectural term abat-vent. And then I said to myself, Eureka! If a structure designed to admit, or to exclude, or to give a certain direction to, the light of day is an abat-jour, and a structure designed to shut off the wind is an abat-vent, why should not a structure contrived to