ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 1750 http://www.s-gabriel.org/1750 ************************************ From: "Brian M. Scott" 21 May 1999 Greetings from the Academy of S. Gabriel! You wanted to modify your registered name, , to make it authentic for northwestern Scotland circa 850 and asked whether was a suitable modification. The only element that is at all questionable is the name itself. This name, which is more accurately written , is a compound of 'life' and a diminutive suffix <-o/c>. (The slash stands for an acute accent over the preceding letter.) This suffix, which was borrowed from an ancestor of Welsh, first appears in Primitive Irish in the sixth century, in the names of Irish monks. As you might expect from that use, it was originally masculine. On the other hand, its modern descendant, <-ag>, is strictly feminine. [1, 2, 3] In order to determine how early the name is plausible, we need to know when <-o/c> began to be used to form feminine pet names. The earliest instance of that we found is the daughter of Donald Bane in the late 11th century. [1] In the next couple of centuries the name appears several times, and by c.1200 it had produced the place-name 'Bethoc's meadow'. Moreover, a Munster princess who died in 1044 was called , a similarly name compounded from 'old' and the suffix <-o/c>. [1, 4, 5] On this evidence it seems likely that the name could have been in use at least by the early 11th century, but that's still a good century and a half later than your period. We did find some evidence suggesting that feminine names with the suffix <-o/c> may be even older than this, but it's a bit equivocal. The mother of an Irish high king who died in 862 was named . Unfortunately, the etymology of this name does not appear to be known, so we cannot be certain that it contains the same suffix. [6] Going back even further, S. Patrick in the 5th century is supposed to have had a niece called , and there is an early Leinster female saint sometimes known as . , like , seems to be of uncertain origin, but is a compound of 'precious, beloved, beautiful' and <-o/c>. Unfortunately, the great Irish compilation of saints' genealogies was probably composed in the 10th century or later, and it may be that these pet forms are inventions of the compiler after the fact. [7, 8, 9] Still, it does not appear that Gaelic naming practices changed greatly between the 9th and the 11th centuries. Thus, while we cannot definitively say that was in use by the middle of the ninth century, we are inclined to think that it could have been. The byname , however, is not at all problematical and is almost exactly right as it stands. The masculine name on which it is based is actually . This construction requires the genitive case of the father's name, but this particular name doesn't change in the genitive, and the byname is therefore . [10] (The genitive case is analogous to the English possessive , as in the literal translation 'Alpin's daughter'.) Moreover, it was not uncommon to omit the accents, so the name could be written either or . It would have been pronounced roughly \BETH-oak EEN-y@n AHL-peen\, where \TH\ represents the sound of in , and \@\ stands for the sound of in and . The name was still in use in Scotland as late as the end of the 13th century, more than late enough for an Alpin to have had a daughter named Bethoc. [11] (or ) would be a fine Scottish Gaelic name from the 11th or 12th century. I hope that this letter has been of use; if you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to write again. For the Academy, Talan Gwynek 21 May 1999 ===== References and Notes: [1] Black, George F. The Surnames of Scotland (New York : New York Public Library, 1946). S.n. Beathag; p. lviii. [2] Royal Irish Academy. Dictionary of the Irish Language: based mainly on Old and Middle Irish materials (Dublin : Royal Irish Academy, 1983). S.v. betha. [3] Thurneysen, Rudolf. A Grammar of Old Irish. Trans. by D.A. Binchy & Osborn Bergin (Dublin: The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1975); p. 173f. [4] Watson, William J. The History of the Celtic Placenames of Scotland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986 [1926]); p. 312. [5] O/ Corra/in, Donnchadh and Fidelma Maguire. Irish Names (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1990). S.n. Cri/no/c. [6] Ibid. s.n. Aro/c. [7] Ibid. s.nn. Lallo/c, Ca/emo/c. [8] O/ Riain, Pa/draig, ed. Corpus Genealogiarum Sanctorum Hiberniae (Dublin: The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1985). Index; pp. xiv-xviii. [9] This theory is particularly attractive in respect of . This saint more often appears as , in which is a spelling variant of . Once <-o/c> had come to be used to form feminine pet names, it would have been very natural to use it to construct from . [10] O'Brien, M. A., ed. Corpus Genealogiarum Hiberniae (Dublin: The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1976). 162 c 50. [11] Black, op. cit., s.n. Alpin.