ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 1616 http://www.s-gabriel.org/1616 ************************************ ************************************************* * * * NOTE: Later research turned up additional * * information relevant to this report. * * See the end of the letter for details. * * * ************************************************* From: "S Friedemann" 3 May 1999 Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You wanted to know if would have been used by a Celtic/Gypsy lady living between 1200 and 1600. Here is the information we have found. Before I start, I'd like to clarify the service that the Academy offers. We try to help Societyfolk in choosing and using names that fit the historical cultures they are trying to re-create. Our research can sometimes be used to support submissions to the College of Arms, but that is not our goal and our results are often incompatible with the College's needs. If your main goal is to register a particular name, then we may not be able to help you. There was no language or culture called "Celtic" in our period. In fact, the word "Celtic" didn't exist in English until modern times. It is used by modern historians and linguists to describe a family of languages and the cultures which spoke them, including Welsh, Gaelic, Cornish, Manx, and Breton. These languages were distinct in our period, and they had very different naming practices which did not mix any more than any other two neighboring languages. The cultures which spoke them were separate, and had no sense of pan-Celtic identity. We assume that you're using the word "gypsy" in a generic sense, meaning a wandering peddler, and that you don't intend your persona to be a member of the Gypsy (Romany) ethnic group. If so, it would have no particular impact on your choice of name. We reviewed both sites that referenced the name , and found them both to be unreliable sources for medieval names; they contain names that were adopted into Gaelic in modern times as well as modern spellings of names. We recommend that you avoid using these sites for choosing names. Unfortunately, we could not find the name in any of our Irish sources. It appears to be a modern adaptation of the name , and was not used in medieval times. If you would like to choose a different name, we recommend reference [1]. Or, if you let us know what first letter or sound you would be interested in having in a name, we'll be glad to send you a list of possibilities. Also, a list of later period Irish feminine names can also be found on the web: "Fourteenth to Sixteenth Century Irish Names and Naming Practices" http://www.panix.com/~mittle/names/tangwystyl/lateirish/ appears to be an English spelling of the Gaelic family name , which meant "male descendant of Faola/n" [2]. This is the masculine form of the family name. A woman would have been known as "daughter of O/ Faola/in," which was written in Gaelic as . A woman named Sorcha who was a member of this clan could have been called , pronounced \SOR-kha IN-yen ee AY-lahn\ from 1200 to 1500 or so, and \SOR-kha NEE AY-lahn\ in the last century of our period. A woman of your period would usually have been identified as her father's daughter. If Sorcha's father were named Conall O/ Faola/n, then she would most often have been called "Sorcha daughter of Domhnall", pronounced \SOR-kha IN-yen KHOHN-ahl\. The changes in spelling and pronunciation of the father's name here and the clan name in the previous example are required by Gaelic grammar for women's names. You can find a more detailed discussion of Gaelic name formation on the web: "Quick and Easy Gaelic Bynames" http://www.stanford.edu/~skrossa/medievalscotland/scotnames/quickgaelicbynames/index.html We hope that this letter has been useful to you, and that you will not hesitate to write again if any part was unclear or if you have further questions. Research and commentary on this letter was provided by Teceangl Bach, Arval Benicoeur, Walraven van Nijmegen, and Talan Gwynek. For the Academy, --Aryanhwy merch Catmael May 3, 1999 --------------------------------------- References: [1] O/ Corra/in, Donnchadh and Fidelma Maguire, _Irish Names_ (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1990). [2] MacLysaght, Edward, _The Surnames of Ireland_ (Dublin: Irish Academic Press Ltd., 1985, ISBN 0-7165-2366-3). - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Correction, 18 Oct 2001, Arval: After a word ending in 'n', like , the letters 'D' and 'T' do not lenite; so I changed the example of the patronymics to illustrate lenition.