ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 984 http://www.s-gabriel.org/984 *********************************** ************************************************* * * * NOTE: Some of the Academy's early reports * * contain errors that we haven't yet * * corrected. Please use it with caution. * * * ************************************************* From: 11 Jun 1998 Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You asked us about , or any form meaning "Ian the Hawk", for a Scottish man born to an English father, and living in the early 14th century. To begin with, is a perfectly reasonable name for the son of an English lord, and there are Gaelic forms of known to exist, such as . Also, a byname meaning "the hawk" would be fine in many European cultures at this time. The primary difficulty is making sure that the spellings of and of the byname are in compatible languages. In particular, it would be inappropriate to combine a Gaelic form of with an English form of . Since is Gelic, and is English, these two spellings would be incompatible. A second problem with using is that it is Gaelic, and it is extremely rare for a byname in Gaelic to be anything other than the name of the father or another male ancestor. Because of this, we cannot suggest a Gaelic form of . Thus, the most likely spellings for your name would be in English or in a Latinized form, rather than in Gaelic. We found the following spellings of in English for your period [1,2]; These would have been pronouned \JOAN\ or \JAYN\, except for , which would have been pronounced \JOE-an\. 1296 1279 1275 1276 1379 We found a dated to 1296 [1], supporting the byname. It's not clear whether represents \HAH-veck\ or \HOW-eck\; and you could probably pronounce it either way. In summary, the best English form for a time around 1300 is , and the likeliest Latinized form is . In case you had registration concerns, we found that there are two similar registered names in the SCA: and . However, is a completely different name from , despite the fact that it is used as a modern short form for . In addition, the two names sound different, and the September, 1994, registration of (Atenveldt) notes that 'Jonathan and John are completely different names, and no one could find any evidence that such a confusion between the two ever occurred or was likely to occur.' There should be no problem with conflict. We hope this has been helpful, and that we can continue to assist you. Talan Gwynek, Effrick neyn Kenneoch, Teceangl Bach, and Zenobia Naphtali contributed to this letter. In service, --Walraven van Nijmegen Academy of S. Gabriel [1] P.H. Reaney & R.M. Wilson, _A Dictionary of English Surnames_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) [2] George F. Black, _The Surnames of Scotland: Their Origin, Meaning and History_ (New York: The New York Public Library, 1986)