IRISH SURNAMES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 26, 27 June 1901, Page 27

IRISH SURNAMES.

Mr. Robert Matheson, the Registrar-General for Ireland (says the London I) nly jYnvs'), has carried on a step further, with the help of thj Irish registrars, those valuable inquiries into Irish surnames which he began in January. 1894, before he had' succeeded to his present post. Our renders will perhaps remember Mr Ma thepuu's luui.aku'iMt: luuuLilioti of iLe hundred principal euriiauies of Ireland. Perhaps the most notable fact about that tabulation was the position of ibe name Smith as fifth on the list, owing, probably, to King Edward IV.'s enactment against the use of Irish names. For the rest, the premier surnames, in their order, were revealed to be Murphy, Kelly, Sullivan, and Wal-h ; and except in the emergence of Smith, the list on the whole bore witness to the gallant struggle of the Irish on behalf of their national names. The present volume adds to these results a new inquiry into the variations and peculiarities affecting the Irish national record of births, deaths, and marriages, and it reveals some very interesting facts as to the change and corruption of names. These vary, of course, with the culture of the people, and probably Mr Mathe->on would find more changes of name among the London Irish than in his own country. Certain changes, indeed, are common to the whole country, as from Guinness through M Guinness to Maginnis ; or from Fevre through Le Fevre to Lefevre. Nor is there anything peculiar to Ireland in the substitution of initial letters, as from Carr to Kerr, Gervis to Jervis, or Quinton to Winton. Names being essentially individual matters are always subject to more change and variety than ordinary nouns. Everyone likes to sign his name in bis own way. Vowels get changed ; Nesbitt becomes Niebett, and Mulligan becomes Milligan, or fresh ones gr-t added, as when Rorke becomes Rourke, and Burke Bourke ; or cumbrous endings get dropped, as when Turkington, being an obvious nuisance and cause of delay to all his neighbors, becomes summarily Turk. Then there are the phonetic changes. It takes education to go on spelling your family name for centuries in absolute defiance of the way it is pronounced — as with names like Cbolmondeley, Cockburne, or Colquhoun Plant these in an uncultured coil, and they spring up as ' Chumley,' ' Coburn.' and ' Cohoun.' There is no need to go to Ireland for that process. The nearest London slum is full of murdered names, like fallen classic columns. A foreign name is subjtcted to the slow torture of alien lips, so that L'Ami becomes Latnmy, and ' Blanc ' becomes ' Blong.' Even an Irish name on its own soil takes the same descent — as O'Luchairen to Loughran. Alexander, transported across the ages, becomes MacAlshinder in the Lame district, and Elshinder in the Lisburn Union. Even members of tho same family raay vary. A father calls himself 'Faulkner,' and his daughter signs the marriage register as ' Falconer.' One brother signs himself ' Fawcett,' and another 1 Fosßir.t. 1 The name man calls himself, so one registrar reports, alternately ' Hayden ' and ' Headen.' A brother is known as Murphy, and his sister ' Morphy.' Names vary with social distinction. The ' Connellans ' of good society are ' Conlans ' of the peasantry. 'A man,' says another registrar in County Kildare, 'a man who would get a little money would change from ' Doolin ' to ' Dowling.' Of the same order, perhaps, is the attraction of a notorious name, e-o that, according to one registrar, all the ' l'arlons ' of bis district have taken to cal) themselves ' Parnells.'

But perhaps the most interesting feature of Mr. Matheson's report is his study of the pystem of double names which prevails throughout Ireland owing to the use of two languages. Even amonir English workmen, as among English schoolboys, it is often difficult to dig for the real name beneath the all-pervading nickname. But in Ireland, according to the grave reports of the registrars, which Mr. Matheson has collected from-all over the country to help him in his work, the habit of using synonyms prevails extensively. One registrar recently reported that some families were invariably called by other than their real names, ' A man living within a hundred yards of James Fitzpatrick or Christopher O'Malley,' writes a Superintendent Registrar, 'would never know who was meant unless they were called " Jem Parrican " or "Kit Meiiu." ' The lribh synonyms probably arose in the course of efforts to evade the Act of 13t>6 forbidding Irish names. So now the same man is called Bird and Heany, Black and Duff, Church and Aglish, Holly and Quillan, Rock and Carrick, the second name in all cases being the Irish translation of the first. A man named By water gave his brother's name as Struffaun. On investigation it was found 'hat Strurfaun was the local form of struthan, an Irish word for a ' little stream." So frequent is this custom that Mr. Matheson even reports an Anglo-French variant, dating probably from the Norman settlement, ' Petit' and 'Little.' This habit of double names is a striking example of the tenacity of the Celtic nomenclature.

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