Sir, - As a comprehensive reply to the points raised by Dr Des Keenan's letter (June 24th), would require a short dissertation, the following remarks must suffice.
On question of Baile Mhic Scanlain as the correct Irish lorm for the Co Louth placename anglicised Ballymascanlan, Dr Keenan may well be correct as the evidence for this name contains a degree of ambiguity. The earliest attestations, in Latin from shortly after 1300, appear to suggest Baile Mac Scanlain as the Irish form; from the mid 16th down to the mid 18th century the evidence points towards Baile Ui Scanlain, while the later 18th and 19th century evidence (together with forms in a number of Irish manuscripts from the period 1578-1650) supports the form Baile Mhic Scanlain. This may be taken as evidence of development (or corruption, if you wish to call it such) of a name in an Irish language context - a common enough development which gets far too little recognition.
While names of the structure Baile Mac X, meaning "the homestead/farmstead/townland of the sons of X", do occur in Irish, they are much less common than those of the structure Baile Mhic X, meaning "the homestead, etc, of Mac X" (i.e. a surname deriving from the personal name X). Likewise with names involving the surname marker O - Baile Ui Y. occurs much more frequently than Baile O Y.
I agree with the first part of Dr Keenan's suggestion that "the anglicised spelling can be a better guide to the original meaning and pronunciation than the spellings devised, often with political bias in the 19th century", but am at a loss as to what he has in mind in the latter part - is he referring to the Irish forms and corresponding anglicised forms proposed by John O'Donovan and his colleagues in the Ordinance Survey's Topographical Department in the 1830s?
Whoever told Dr Keenan that the Irish form of his surname was "O Chianain" was mistaken. The correct form is O Cianain, a name attested for the past six and a half centuries at least being borne, for example, by the celebrated Fermanagh scholar scribes of the 14th century, Adhamh, Ruaidhri band Sean O Cianain, and by the diarist Tadhg O Cianain who accompanied the Ulster earls on their "flight" to Rome in 1607. (The personal name, Cianan, from which the surname derives is attested much earlier, eg, St Cianan of Duleek whose obit occurs in the Annals at the year 489.) The length mark on the second "a" long antedates any evidence for the Munster dialect of Irish and has nothing to do with the different stress pattern found in most northern dialects.
I know of no evidence for Dr Keenan's belief that only "clan chiefs" had a right to the particle O (originally ua), meaning "grandson" and, by extension, "descendant". A look through such sources as the Fiants, Inquisitions and Patent Rolls of the late 16th and early 17th centuries will show that surnames were borne by all classes in Gaelic society. The same sources admittedly testify to the common use of patronymics - but by all classes, and not to the exclusion of surnames. (I pass over the appropriateness or otherwise of using the term "clan" in an Irish, as opposed to a Scottish, context.)
Finally, a quibble. When Dr Keen an refers to "the AngloSaxon regions of the British Isles", could he say where, outside of Britain, there is such a region in which the -ingham placenames which he mentions may be found? Yours, etc.,
School of Modern and
Medieval Languages,
The Queen's University
Belfast.
