The Shiawassee Snye ?

A snye is a side-water channel that rejoins a larger river, creating an island.

The word is an Englishing of the Québécois French chenail, `channel.'
Chenail is an Acadian dialect form of the standard continental French word
for water channel, chenal.

 Snye is spelled the way it is in Canadian English because it imitates the
 Quebec pronunciation of chenail, which is shneye, to rhyme with eye.
 Because the second syllable of chenail is stressed hard, in rapid colloquial speech
 the unstressed first syllable of chenail tends to almost disappear,
hence the pronunciation shneye.

A little geography lesson for the 2012 Labor Day weekend.

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