difficult to distinguish between the three species of spruce occurring on the island (Picea g/auca, white spruce, Picea rubens, red spruce, and Picea mariana, black spruce)“, and in fact the three seem never to have been distinguished in the written records of the French period.9

Nomenclature — This problem in identification is further compounded by regional and historical variations in the French nomenclature for these species (Table 1—1). The current standard name for the fir in all three variants of the language (acadien, canadien and French) is sapin1o (though as footnote 9 indicates some observers also included the spruces under sapin, which led Ganong to suggest that sapin may have been used in the early records as a generic name for all of the short-needled conifers).11 By contrast, the standard common name for spruce differs in all three regions (Table 1-1): in Acadia it is prusse, in Quebec épinette and in France épicea.

Prusse (sometimes as pruche) appears to be the earliest of the three names: its first recorded use anywhere is by Jacques Cartier in the report of his first visit to North America in 1534, where he noted pruche on the Gaspé coast.” ln Acadia

3 Because of hybridisation between the red and black spruces, even experts can have difficulties in identifying some individual trees (eg see Manley 1971).

9 Two of the early recorders for Prince Edward Island (Nicolas Denys and Thomas Pichon), in other parts of their writings, did make an attempt to sub-divide the firs and spruces: Denys (1672) (reprinted in Ganong 1908, p. 107), in his description of the trees along the Pentagoiiet River (now the Penobscot in Maine) said that there were three species of sapin, one of which he called the pmsse. From his description, Ganong speculates that the three species are most likely balsam fir (or just possibly, hemlock), red spruce, and white or black spruce.

Pichon (1760) (pp. 11-12), in his description of the trees of Cape Breton Island, says there were four species of sapin: one similar to the European — this must be the fir — followed by the epinette blanche, the epinette rouge and the perusse. However I have found that his whole description has been taken without acknowledgement directly from Pierre Charlevoix‘s Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France [Vol. 5, p. 236], and thus has no independent value for the trees of either Cape Breton Island or Prince Edward Island (see Charlevoix 1744).

1° As a name, sapin certainly pre-dates all of the other names for the spruces and firs in French — according to Le Grand Robert

(2001) its earliest use in surviving records is in 1080.

11 Ganong 1908, p. 379. This perhaps accounts for Biggar's (1933) (e.g. p. 164) idiosyncratic translation of sapin in the Voyages de Champlain as spruce rather than fir.

‘2 Biggar 1924, p. 47. Massignon and various French dictionaries cite Cartier‘s use here of pruche as the earliest known written record. Prusse is actually the French word for Prussia — the tree name prusse being a shortening of an earlier longer name sapin de prusse (Le. ‘Prussian fir'). The Baltic was the chief source for

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prusse has been used for spruce ever since — both in the historical records and in the language of today. However in Canadian-French, at some stage the name pruche became attached to the hemlock (Tsuga canadens/s) (a tree with an entirely different name in Acadian—French — see below), and a new word, épinette, became the standard name for spruce (its first recorded use is in 1664).13

Meanwhile in France, the names prusse and épinette either never attained widespread use, or fell out of use early and were replaced by a new standard name for the spruces: épicea — a word derived directly from the Latin name of the genus (Picea) — first attested in 1765.”

Table 1-1 helps to clarify these usages — though it does not show all past and current regional and dialectical variations, especially in France. The problem in interpreting the early records for Prince Edward Island is that three of these names (sapin, prusse (also as pruche) and épinette) occur in the records (Tables 1-2 and 1-3) — not surprisingly épicea never occurs.

The tree lists — Because of these problems with identification and nomenclature we have to be more careful and less definite in interpreting these names in Tables 1—2 and 1-3 than for other species. We can be certain that the four species of spruce and fir now occurring on the island also occurred in the past, even if their relative abundance may not have been the same as today. Thus for these trees it is more a matter of using our knowledge about their present occurrence to

France of this largely foreign tree which was imported as wood. The etymology of the English name 'spruce‘ is exactly the same: ‘Spruce‘ is an archaic English word for Prussia, and analogous to the French usage, the wood was originally called ‘spruce-fir', which was shortened to spruce (Oxford 1971). Massignon (1962) (p. 171) found that the first French use of prusse for the tree (Cartier in 1534), pre—dates the first known English usage of ‘spruce’ (1670), and it is thus possible that the English name of the tree may have been influenced by the French, rather than the reverse as was formerly thought.

‘3 Massignon 1962, p. 168. The derivation of the word épinette is not as transparent as might at first sight seem - Massignon (p. 170) suggests that it may come from a combination of pinet (little pine) and épine (thorn).

To make for further confusion, since the seventeenth century épinette has also been used in Canadian-French as the standard common name for the tamarack, in the form épinette rouge— this name does not occur in Acadian-French where the tamarack is called the violon.

1‘ Le Grand Robert (2001). It also cites the use in 1553 of the Latin name picea in French in the form arbre de picea.