Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 802

Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 802

This report is available at http://www.s-gabriel.org/802

Some of the Academy's early reports contain errors that we haven't yet corrected. Please use it with caution.

Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel!

You asked for help choosing a Scottish Gaelic name from the 10th or 11th century. You wrote that you want to use <Arthur> as your given name, and either <McCreight> or <Boyd> as your father's given name. Here is what we have found.

The names you chose are all English spellings and all first appeared at least a century later than your period, so none of them is exactly appropriate to your persona. However, the names derive from Gaelic roots which could have been used in a name from your period.

<Arthur> is an English spelling on the Gaelic name <Artúr>, recorded in Scotland as early as the late 6th century and in Ireland in the 9th and 11th centuries [1]. (The slash in the name represents an accent on the preceding vowel.) The Scottish Gaelic spelling in your period is probably <Artuir>, but we do not have another example in Scotland until 1439, when we find <Carlich Makerthyre>, a Scots spellings of the Gaelic name <Tairdhealbheach mac Artuir> [2]. Scots was a language closely related to contemporary English, distinct from Gaelic. The two languages were spoken in parts of Scotland through much of our period. The two Scottish examples of <Artuir> are long before and long after your period, respectively, and it is tempting to conclude that the name was in continuous use from the 6th to the 15th century. Unfortunately, this isn't certain: It is also possible that the name dropped out of use before your period and was re-adopted into Scottish Gaelic from the literary romances of the 12th and 13th centuries. However, it is definitely possible that <Artuir> was used in Scottish Gaelic in your period; we think it is a reasonable name for your persona.

<McCreight> is an anglicized spelling of the Scottish Gaelic <Mac Creacht> [3], but we can't discover the origin of that name. Our best guess is that it derives from the early Gaelic given name <Nechta> (also the root of such names as <MacNaught> and MacNeight>) [2, 5]. That may seem a little weird, but remember that names can change a lot over four or five centuries in a largely oral, multi-lingual culture. What we think may have happened is that <Mac Neacht> or <Mac Neachta> "son of Nechta" may have been corrupted in two steps. First, the <N> was replaced by an <R>. That variation is found in several other Gaelic names: for example <Nechta> is also recorded as <Reachta> [5], and <Ninian> appears in Scots as <Rineyan> in 1301 [2 s.n. Ninian]. Second, <Mac Reacht> was mis-interpretted as <Mac Creacht>, shifting the \k\ sound from the first word to the second, and this name was eventually written by English speakers as <MacCreight>.

If you want to use an early Gaelic name which is the original form of <MacCreight>, then our best suggestion is that you call yourself <Artuir mac Neacht> "Artuir son of Nechta", pronounced \AR-toor mahk NYAHKHT\ or \mahk KREHCHT\, where \KH\ represents the hard, rasping <ch> sound in German <Bach> or Scottish <loch>, and \CH\ represents the softer <ch> sound in German <ich>. That doesn't sound exactly like your original choice, but it is our best guess at the correct early Gaelic root of <MacCreight>. <MacCreight> itself is not appropriate for your persona, since an anglicized form of a Gaelic name could not possibly have existed in the 10th or 11th century.

The Scottish surname <Boyd> probably derives from a place name, <Bute> in modern usage, <Bod> in Gaelic, and recorded in the 13th century in various forms [2]:

Robertus de Boyd 1205
Alan de Bodha 1214
Robert Boyt or Boit or Boyd, c.1300

Gaelic-speakers in Scotland did not use place names in their own names; there is no Gaelic equivalent of the English construction <Arthur of Boyd>. Gaelic men of your period were known primarily as their fathers' sons, using so-called "patronymic bynames". They occasionally also used descriptive or occupational bynames. For more details on the construction of Gaelic names, you may want to read these articles:

Scottish Names 101
http://www.stanford.edu/~skrossa/medievalscotland/scot_names_101.html

A Simple Guide to Constructing 12th Century Scottish Gaelic Names http://www.stanford.edu/~skrossa/medievalscotland/simple_sc_gaelic_names_12.html

These articles don't directly address 10th and 11th century names, but the general principles are applicable to your period.

In your period, Scottish Gaelic was not a written language. If your name were written down, it would have been written in Latin. One Latin form of <Artuir> is <Arturus> [4]. A patronymic would have been translated into Latin, with <mac> replaced by <filius>, the Latin word for "son", and your father's name recorded phonetically and latinized with the genitive ending <-i>. (The genitive form of a word is the possessive form, e.g. <John's>.) So <Artuir mac Neacht> might have been recorded as <Arturus filius Niecti> or <Arturus filius Crecti>.

I hope this letter has been useful. Please write us again if any part of it has been unclear or if you have other questions. I was assisted in researching and writing this letter by Talan Gwynek.

For the Academy,

Arval Benicoeur


References

[1] O/ Corráin, Donnchadh and Fidelma Maguire, _Irish Names_ (Dublin: The

Lilliput Press, 1990).

[2] Black, George F., _The Surnames of Scotland: Their Origin, Meaning and

History_, (New York: The New York Public Library, 1986).

[3] MacLysaght, Edward, _The Surnames of Ireland_ (Dublin: Irish Academic

Press Ltd., 1985, ISBN 0-7165-2366-3).

[4] Withycombe, E.G., _The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names_,

3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

[5] O'Brien, M. A., ed., Corpus Genealogiarum Hiberniae (Dublin: The Dublin

Institute for Advanced Studies, 1976).