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TEYOYAGON:SPLIT IN TWO

OAS ARCH NOTES 87-2:20

John Steckley

The first name recorded for the Toronto area, “Teyoyagon”, appears in the c1680 map of southern Ontario usually ascribed to Abbe Claude Bernou (Trigger 1976:838-39).  It referred to a Seneca village established near the Humber River sometime after 1666, one of a string of Iroquois villages across the northern shores of Lake Ontario.

There are a variety of spellings for the village name (see Robinson 1965:226-229), the main two contenders being a -yo-/-io- form or an -ia- one. This -o- vs -a- opposition is not unusual for the writing of Seneca names at that time (e.g., the earlier ‘Taronto’ being replaced by the later ‘Toronto’; see Robinson, 1965:226-29).

The correct form in this case can be determined by the pronoun forms that appear in Seneca for consonant stem verbs, the most common conjugation in Iroquoian verbs and the obvious choice for this word.  The appropriate form for an ‘it’ pronoun could be either -ga- or -yo-.  As none of the spellings of this placename include the -g-, the -yo- form would seem to be the right one.

The verb is -yahk- meaning ‘to break’ (Chafe and Curry in Mithun and Woodbury 1980:54 #69).  With the stative aspect (which takes the -yo- pronoun form), it becomes -yagon-.  Add the dualic -te- and the pronoun we have ‘teyoyagon’, meaning ‘it is cut or split in two’.

That it could be the Humber River that is split in two is suggested by the following Huron examples using the same verb.

1) “te otia,i” – Montreal (Potier 1920:264)
This is the Huron equivalent of the Seneca term, also meaning ‘it is split in two’.  It refers to where the St. Lawrence splits in two going around Montreal Island.

2) “Ti8skonchia,i 8ndiara” – Niagara Falls (Potier 1920:154)
Added to the verb is the noun for waterfall (Potier 1920:453).  The meaning is ‘waterfall split in two’, referring to the twin falls of Niagara.

It seems to me that Teyoyagon would probably refer to where the Humber goes around an island.  A possibility, but less likely, is that it could be a reference to what are now the Toronto Islands.

References

Chafe, Wallace and Edward Curry
1980 “Red Jacket” in Marianne Mithun and Hanni Woodbury, Northern Iroquoian Texts, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, pp. 45-55.

Potier, Pierre
1920 Fifteenth Report of the Bureau of Archives for the Province of Ontario, Toronto, Clarkson W. James.

Robinson, Percy J.
1965 Toronto during the French Regime, 2nd edition, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

Trigger, Bruce
 1976 The Children of Aataentsic, 2 volumes, McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, Montreal.

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