1 24 Journal of American Folk-Lore.
During a recent visit to Long Lake Village, Hamilton County, I called upon Mr. Mitchell Sabattis of the Abenaki tribe (Algic family), the oldest living Indian in the Adirondacks, who gave me the follow- ing Abenaki names of localities, most of which are in the neighbor- hood of Long Lake. My informant's father, the late Peter Sabattis, dead fifty years ago, but still remembered familiarly as Captain Peter, was a native of St. Francis, P. Q., the ancient reserve of the remnant of the Abenakis in Canada. Peter Sabattis and his Abenaki wife removed to the Mohawk community at St. Regis Falls late in the last century, where Mitchell was born about ninety years ago. The father and son were accustomed to hunt in St. Lawrence, Franklin, and Hamilton counties in company with other Abenakis, who gave names to a number of the Adirondack lakes and rivers, only a few of which, however, are now recalled by the aged Mitchell.
Of these the most important is the name Saranac, which is, ac- cording to Sabattis, a corruption of an Abenaki form Snhdlo'nek, which he explains as meaning 'entrance of a river into a lake.' The same word appears in Laurent's " Abenaki and English Dialogues," p. 52, in the form Son-Halonek as the native name for Plattsburg. As the Saranac River debouches at Plattsburg into Lake Champlain, there can be no doubt that the name was applied to the river at that point, rather than to the two lakes now known as Upper and Lower Saranac.
The Abenaki term as given both by Sabattis and Laurent presents many difficulties to the philologist. The Very Rev. M. C. O'Brien, 1 of Bangor, Me., an excellent authority both on the ancient Abenaki and its modern Penobscot dialect, believes that S'n (Sou) halo'uek is either not an original Abenaki word, e. g. that it may be an Indian corruption of Saranac, or else that it must be a mutilated modern form. Owing to the following evidence, I am inclined to the latter hypothesis. The word may be a derivative from the two elements : 1. sa'rigSk? ' mouth of a river,' of which sn or son in this combina-
1 Fr. O'Brien, the Roman Catholic Vicar-General of Maine, has in his posses- sion the manuscript dictionaries of the Abenaki by Pere Aubery (171 5), mentioned by Gill in his brochure, Vieux Manuscrits Abenakis, pp. 5 ff., 1 1 ff., Montreal, 1886. These works are very valuable for the study of the ancient Abenaki lan- guage. The references to Father O'Brien in this article are to letters from him to me concerning the place-names herein treated.
2 The systems of noting the ancient and modern Abenaki differ slightly. In the ancient language the missionaries used the numeral 8 to denote the ■zf-sound. The nasal n, always after a—a'n, is now represented by <?=6ri (as in French mon). I use the apostrophe ( ' ) to indicate a very short vowel similar to the Hebrew s/i'va mobile, and the sign ' to denote a guttural voice-stop not unlike the Semitic Ayin. This is unfortunately not shown in the system of writing the modern dialect. Where the ancient speech had r, I now universally appears. In the modern words cited in this treatise the quantity of every vowel is marked. Note
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