Description

If you are Acadian and able to speak French, then whenever you take a walk in the woods in any part of Prince Edward Island it may be that you will be able to put a French name to many of the trees that you come across. But have you ever wondered where these names come from? Perhaps you learned them from a textbook or in a biology class. But you are also likely to have picked up some of the names in a more casual way from other people. If this is so, it is likely that you will have been the inheritor of an oral tradition that goes all the way back to the first colonists who arrived in Acadia from France in the 17th century – and as I shall show for some tree names, even as far back as the first voyage of Jacques Cartier to the New World in 1534. In fact, the names given to our native trees in Acadian-French are a fascinating part of our collective linguistic heritage, with some of the names being even older than the equivalent names now in use in France, while others serve to distinguish the linguistic inheritance of Acadian-French from that of Quebec. In a study that I have been carrying out on the history of the Island’s forests, I have come across various early French tree names in historical documents relating to Île Saint-Jean (as Prince Edward Island was called during the French period), and a small survey (comprising three men from the Evangeline region familiar with What’s in a Name? the names of trees) has confirmed that almost all of these early names are still in general use on the Island.