English to a range of the "Endless Mountains."


3. NIPPE, NIPI (= _n'pi_; Narr. _nip_; Muhh. _nup_; Abn. and Chip.
_nebi_; Del. _m'bi_;) and its diminutives, _nippisse_ and _nips_, were
employed in compound names to denote WATER, generally, without
characterizing it as 'swift flowing,' 'wave moved,' 'tidal,' or
'standing:' as, for example, in the name of a part of a river, where
the stream widening with diminished current becomes lake-like, or of a
stretch of tide-water inland, forming a bay or cove at a river's
mouth. By the northern Algonkins, it appears to have been used for
'lake,' as in the name of _Missi-nippi_ or _Missinabe_ lake ('great
water'), and in that of Lake _Nippissing_, which has the locative
affix, _nippis-ing_, 'at the small lake' north-east of the greater
Lake Huron, which gave a name to the nation of 'Nipissings,' or as the
French called them, '_Nipissiriniens_,'--according to Charlevoix, the
true Algonkins.

_Quinnipiac_, regarded as the Indian name of New Haven,--also written
Quinnypiock, Quinopiocke, Quillipiack, &c., and by President
Stiles[25] (on the authority of an Indian of East Haven)
_Quinnepyooghq_,--is, probably, 'long water place,'
_quinni-nippe-ohke_, or _quin-nipi-ohke_. _Kennebec_ would seem to be
another form of the same name, from the Abnaki, _k[oo]né-be-ki_, were
it not that Râle wrote,[26] as the name of the river,
'_Aghenibékki_'--suggesting a different adjectival. But Biard, in the
_Relation de la Nouvelle-France_ of 1611, has '_Kinibequi_,'
Champlain, _Quinebequy_, and Vimont, in 1640, '_Quinibequi_,' so that
we are justified in regarding the name as the probable equivalent of
_Quinni-pi-ohke_.