Algonquin “Wawa” and French “Oie” Both Mean Goose, Probably by Coincidence

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. This is Brian Amaral calling from Edison, New Jersey.

Hello, Brian.

Hi, Brian. What’s going on?

So I moved to New Jersey about six months ago and started noticing that there’s a convenience store around here and all around the Mid-Atlantic called Wawa.

And it’s kind of an interesting name. I looked at the logo, and the logo is a goose.

So, you know, being somebody who speaks a little bit of French, I figured that Wawa, in French, the word for goose is Waa.

It’s spelled O-I-E, but it’s pronounced Waa.

So I figured that that’s where they got it from since the goose was the logo and just sort of went on my way thinking I was pretty smart.

But then one day I decided to actually look it up on Google to see whether this was the case.

And I found out that actually it’s called Wawa because it was founded in Wawa, Pennsylvania.

But according to the Convenience Source website, the word Wawa is a Native American word for goose.

So the question that I had was, is it a coincidence that French, you know, a European language and a Native American language would have a very similar word for goose, which is not a very common word?

And it got me thinking about word origins.

Can you help me?

Yeah, sure.

Absolutely we can.

So is there a chance that this Native American word, wah-wah, is related to the French and wah, right, for goose?

There’s always a chance, but the odds are against it.

And here’s why.

We see similarities in words when they’re borrowed from one culture into another.

When culture A, for example, doesn’t have that thing and culture B does, then culture A will borrow the word for it as it borrows the thing.

But we know for certain with this particular word that that existed in the Algonquin languages, Lanap, a few other languages spoken in Pennsylvania, around the Great Lakes, even up into Canada for goose, regardless of where the French were or what the French were doing in the New World.

And the goose, the geese were already here.

And the Native Americans did not need to borrow that word because they had one.

And it was a part of the vocabulary.

There’s actually a really interesting, I guess I’d call it a thesaurus of Native American languages from 1837 from a periodical called the Archelogia Americana.

And it’s got a chart where it takes words like goose and snake and bark and leaf and moon and tree and lists the words from all of the languages that they can find in North America, from all these different glossaries and dictionaries and lexicons, and they include this word.

But the key here is not that it actually exists and that it sounds the same.

The key is they didn’t need to borrow bark and leaf and tree and moon because they had those things already, and so there’s no reason to think that they would need to borrow goose.

You can also flip it around.

The other thing that happens is we find unexpected coincidences because there are a limited amount of sounds that the human mouth can make.

And so there are a limited amount of configurations.

And so repetition, particularly for two-syllable or one-syllable words, is incredibly common.

So, for example, the word B-A-D means bad in English, but it turns out something that sounds almost exactly like bad in Farsi also means bad.

It’s just a coincidence.

And you have words that sound the same that don’t mean the same or look the same.

R-E-D is red in English.

R-E-D is red in Spanish and means net.

So different things there.

So a lot of, I mean, you can just, thousands of these phonetic coincidences exist between languages.

Well, and in this one in particular, it almost seems onomatopoetic, doesn’t it?

That’s what I was thinking.

It could be.

Wah.

It could be.

So what’s really very interesting to me, and I have it here in front of me, is that for most of the Native American languages, and it’s probably not the right thing linguistically to lump them together, but I’m going to do it anyway, it turns out that the word for egg for many other languages is similar or identical to wawa, which means goose in just a few languages.

So it’s entirely possible that the wawa for goose actually came from the term for egg, and didn’t come from the, I mean, which would further kind of like disprove the idea that it came from the French.

So which came first, the wah-wah or the egg, right?

Yeah, exactly. The goose or the egg.

So, Brian, does that help?

Yeah. You know, I’m a little bit surprised to hear that it’s just a coincidence.

I guess that makes it, you know, pretty interesting.

Google the term linguistic coincidence, and I think you’ll come up with more than a few pages that have long lists of these.

Utterly coincidental with no etymological evidence there to support the connection at all.

Interesting.

Well, thanks, Grant.

Thanks, Martha.

It’s amazing the things you can think of when you’re filling up your tank with gas.

Well, when somebody else is doing it for you, I live in New Jersey.

Oh, yeah, New Jersey.

They’re fancy there.

They have someone else do it for you.

Brian, thank you so much for calling.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, sir.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I can’t not mention this.

You know, there’s a famous poem by Longfellow.

Oh, please.

The Song of Hiawatha.

He mentions Wawa for goose in there.

Can I read this to you?

Please do.

Let’s see.

This is just a part of it.

Oh, were the water floating, flying, something in the hazy distance, something in the mists of morning loomed and lifted from the water, now seemed floating, now seemed flying, coming nearer, nearer, nearer.

Was it Shingibus, the diver?

Was it the pelican, the Shada?

Or the heron, the Shashaga?

Or the white goose, Wah-Bee-Wah-Wah, with the water dripping, flashing from its glossy neck and feathers?

And there’s more of that.

That’s great, but…

The Longfellow.

How can you compete with the Longfellow?

And you’re reading it, Grant.

I think we should just turn off the phones for the rest of the hour and you just continue, please.

You flatter me and I like it.

Okay.

Instead, call us 877-929-9673.