Vermin’s 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. Here’s 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 Québécois French chenail, ‘channel.’ 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 ‘SOH-fuh.’ The fuh is a schwa, that is, all that remains of a poor little unstressed terminal a. Now let’s follow the circuitous but fascinating journey this word snye has taken through six thousand years. We’ll use a symbol in linguistics, borrowed from mathematics. In reference to words and word roots, the symbol < means ‘derives from,’ ‘is descended from.’ Canadian English snye < Quebec French chenail ‘water channel’ < French chenal ‘channel’< Latin canalis ‘water-pipe,’ ‘large ditch,’ ‘groove’ < Latin canna ‘cane,’ ‘reed’ < Greek kanna ‘hollow reed.’ The Proto-Indo-European root *kann meant ‘reed’ or ‘hemp plant.’ 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 ‘reed,’ qaneh. Look at an Arabic word for ‘reed,’ qanah. Go back farther to the cuneiform inscriptions of ancient Babylon and find the common Akkadian word for ‘reed,’ kanû. Egyptian hieroglyphics have a generic word for ‘reed of the River Nile,’ ganu.
Many Canadian Place Names Use the Word Snye Brandon, Manitoba has its Snye River. Three Snye Rapids gurgle near Parry Sound, Ontario. Canada ’s oil-and-tar-sands hub in northern Alberta is Fort McMurray. Fort McM. has Canada ’s best known instance of this geographic word, locally named The Snye Water Park, “a 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. Anne’s Island First Nations Territory, and empties into Lake St Clair. Here’s an old postcard from 1914 showing a ferry on the snye at Wallaceburg, Ontario.
If you have ever skated breezily along Ottawa ’s frozen Rideau Canal, you may know, as a guide states, that “the canal channel was originally a natural depression in the riverbank, known locally as the ‘Oxford Snye.’ Colonel By — Ottawa ’s first name was Bytown, named after the colonel — 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.” In British Columbia ’s Fort Simpson Territorial Park, many species of birds use “The Snye” as a nesting area. “The 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.” 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
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a causeway was built. This effectively dammed the outflow of the Snye into the Athabasca River providing a secluded spot for float plane activity. Winter operations include a dropoff point for snowmobilers and public skating.” Fort McMurray ’s Snye is also a spot to enjoy the brief northern summer. The Fort McMurray Rowing Club is located on the Snye. 
