Talk:Donnchadh, Earl of Lennox

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The insistant use of Gaelic names on these pages about Scotland is quite ridiculous and actually damages the articles. By this time the aristocracy, even in Argyll, were using Anglicised names and this is very evident from the charters in Great Seal of Scotland (the printed versions commence about 1300) and the Exchequer Rolls of Scotland. The Campbell Muniments in the National Archives of Scotland are in Latin and English in the 14th century and the names therein are not written in Gaelic. It is not possible to turn the clock back and we do not want to see re-written history on Wikipedia. David Lauder 12:39, 10 April 2007 (UTC) Firstly, you should distinguish between Latinised spellings and English spellings. English spellings are borrowed from Latinised spellings, and it is rare to find any non-Gaelic names with standard forms in early Scottish English. E.g. the most common way of rendering the name Domhnall in Latin, French or English is usually Douenald/Dovenald, not Donald. Try finding a standard form for the name Niall; you'll find Nele, Nigell, Niel, etc, etc. The names Domhnall and Donnchadh are not of course English either, and to speakers of the language they were foreign names; the syncretic pattern of naming in Scotland, i.e. the regularity of Gaelic-derivied names among English speakers in Scotland, is a phenomenon with its origins in the modern period, not the middle ages. Secondly, almost nothing is written in English in Scotland until the second half of the 14th century, and after that period English assumes the role of Latin. Use of the language reflects bureaucratic necessity, not cultural inclinations. This is especially relevant for places like Argyll, Lennox, Ross, Carrick, Menteith, where English was not spoken in this period, confining access to legal documents and such to a small hierarchy of acculturated landlords, bureaucrats and incomers. Legal documents have to be comprehended by royal officials and a greater "international" audience; histories written in the later middle ages for Gaelic speaking families such as the MacDonalds of Islay, Kennedys of Carrick and Earls of Ross are written in English because they were aimed at the elite of the kingdom, not because they did not use Gaelic (it was usually the abundant Gaelic oral traditions from which stories were drawn). A guy called Domhnall who is called Dovenald in an English source is no more English that he is Roman when his name is rendered Dovenaldus. Thirdly, Gaelic orthography as we know it was not used very often in medieval Scotland; Scottish Gaelic was more often than not written in the standard western European script, used for Latin and English; knowledge of the idiosyncratic Irish script had collapsed by the middle of the 13th century. The Gaelic writer who recorded this earl's execution called him Murmóir Lemhna, a spelling reflecting the pronunciation of his title, but far from the traditional spelling (in this case the spelling was not remembered in Ireland, because Mormaer was a Scottish Gaelic word not in regular use in Ireland). It was only revived in the modern period with the romantic spelling conventions we're all familiar with (the idiosyncrasy of these spelling conventions has its origins in how the Welsh-speaking Britons wrote Latin in late antiquity). Which leads to the fourth point, Gaelic speakers or rulers of Gaelic areas in the Middle Ages are no less entitled to have their names in their own language than Polish speakers, German speakers, English speakers, Castilian speakers, etc, even if that involves modernising or standardising the orthography for comprehensibility. For English use, go and try find the form "John" in a source from this period. The name Władysław would have been incomprehensible to anyone from Poland before the 16th century, but that is nevertheless how historians render the names of pre-1500s rulers with that name (Wladislas, Vladislav, Ladislaus, etc). Failure to do so creates a distorted pattern of cognition, and makes Scottish historiography look backward. Deacon of Pndapetzim (Talk) 09:32, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Last edited at 09:32, 18 May 2007 (UTC). Substituted at 13:39, 29 April 2016 (UTC)