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The First Thousand Years of British Names: Appendix VI | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Articles > Names The First Thousand Years of British Names Appendix VI by Tangwystyl verch Morgant Glasvryn
Appendix VI - A special consideration of some Irish inscriptions in early Britain (This section has been circulated previously as a separate pamphlet.)The source for these names are funerary monuments set up by Irish colonists in Britain, mainly from the 5th and 6th centuries with a few from the early 7th. Most of them are found with parallel Latin and Ogham texts. The Irish (Ogham) generally consists only of a personal name in the genitive (possessive) form, meaning approximately "[the stone of] so-and-so". The Latin form often has a formula involving hic iacet "here lies so-and-so". For that reason, most of the given names are available only in the genitive form. For use in patronymics this is ideal, however people also need given names. In many cases, Jackson has suggested nominative forms, or mentioned other instances of the name in the nominative. Where he has given none, I have made a guess at a possible nominative based on the available information. These guesses should not be considered entirely reliable. My guesses are in curly brackets. All other information in these lists is from Jackson. The text of the inscriptions are given in upper case letters because that's what was used. Punctuation (such as hyphens) has been added by modern editors. Letters in parentheses in the inscriptions are ones that either are questionable or are missing entirely and have been filled in by the researchers. For those unfamiliar with the convention, an asterisk in front of a word or name means that it is a modern reconstruction rather than actually having been found in a text somewhere. To start with, here is a list of the given names. Except for Avitoriga, all given names are masculine. It is interesting, though, that there is a masculine version of this name, Avitorix, indicating that other given names ending in -rix can be feminized in the same way.
Patterns Of Names In The InscriptionsThe formation of whole names, putting the pieces together, is the area in which information is most often lacking. Here we have an advantage in that most of the examples are full personal names.Relationship patternsThe overwhelming pattern, both in numbers of variants and in sheer numbers of examples is something along the lines of <given name in the nominative> <relationship word in the nominative> <given name in the genitive>. The spelling of the words for the relationship vary considerably and Jackson specifically notes that the alternation between single and double internal consonants is not significant. The relationship words used in these examples are mostly in the genitive, but luckily we have clues to the nominative for most of them.
Other PatternsIn addition to the use of "relationship words" with the given name of another person, there is one example in which the individual is noted as being the "son" of a tribe: MAQQI-IARI ... MAQQI MUCCOI DOVVINIAS, "[of] MaqqiIaras son of the tribe of Dovinias".There are three inscriptions where a given name is followed by another word, also in the genitive (as far as I can tell). Two have no clues as to whether the second word is a name or a byname, but in the third it is clearly a byname: SIMILINI TOVISACI where the second word is cognate to modern Welsh tywysog and modern Irish toisech "prince". (Given the extreme similarity of the early forms of these words, it may be impossible to tell whether it is meant to be Irish or British in this context.) The final pattern I found is a bit frustrating because most of the Ogham inscription has been lost, leaving only the final name. The Latin reads DOBVNNI FABRI FILII ENABARRI "[of] Dobunnas the smith, son of Enabarros". It is probably safe to assume that the word order was the same in the Ogham inscription. So to summarize, I found the following patterns (names and words are in the nominative unless otherwise noted):
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