Category: tourism Newfoundland

L'Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland

Though Newfoundland is mostly English speaking today, it enjoys a mixed French and English heritage. As a result, some localities originally used French names. As times evolved and as English became more widespread, the names were changed to reflect the current reality.

Not wanting to dissipate this cultural heritage, the powers that be decided that if a name was too difficult or awkward to pronounce in English, it would be written using an English term so that the phonetic pronunciation remain reasonably close to the French name.

And so we have L’Anse aux Meadows. L’Anse means the cove in French. Literally translated, it means the Cove of meadows or the meadow cove. What could this possibly mean?

The original French name referred to Anse aux Méduses (jelly fish cove). Meadows is a phonetic approximation to Méduses.

This is very similar to Rose Blanche, on the Southern Coast. The original French name was Roche (rock) Blanche (white), alluding to the abundant white quartz rock present in the area. Rose was chosen as a phonetic way to pronounce roche in English. So today we have a name that once referred to white rock now referring to a white rose.

To add more twist, some names are not pronounced the way they are written!

For example Quirpon and Quirpon Island are pronounced Car-poon.

So there we have it.