Pagan Holdover

Today is the feast of Demetrius of Thessaloniki, one of the more significant warrior saints (and a myroblytic one to boot). 

What I find interesting is that “Demetrius” is in fact a pagan-derived name, meaning “devoted to Demeter.” It’s parallel to “Isidore,” meaning “gift of Isis,” or “Diodorus,” meaning “gift of Zeus.” All three of these names are borne by Christian saints! Apparently, like the names of the days of the week or the months of the year, early Christians were prepared to tolerate this vestige of paganism. I suppose by the late Roman empire names were simply “names,” as they are for us, and fewer people were in the habit of inventing literal names expressing qualities they hoped to see in their children. 

Washington and Lee

From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Washington and Lee University has decided to make changes to the names of some campus buildings after concerns from students and faculty.

On Tuesday, the Board of Trustees announced that it will rename Robinson Hall as Chavis Hall, in honor of John Chavis, the first African-American to receive a college education in the United States. He graduated from Washington Academy, the predecessor of W&L, in 1799. Also, Lee-Jackson House will be renamed Simpson Hall in honor of Pamela Hemenway Simpson, who served as an associate dean of the college and helped move to a co-ed environment in the 1980s.

The board also announced that effective immediately, it will replace portraits of Robert E. Lee and George Washington in military uniforms inside Lee Chapel with portraits of the two men in civilian clothing. The board also ordered the doors to the statue chamber in the 1883 addition to Lee Chapel to be closed during university events.

These changes are not particularly radical, although I would be keen to know exactly how many “students and faculty” we are actually talking about here (university administrators love to sniff out mandates to do things they want to do anyway). Dropping the “Lee” from the university’s name, so that it reverts to “Washington University,” or changing the name entirely (cf. “Arcadia University“), would be very radical indeed. (Robert E. Lee was president of Washington College after the Civil War and promoted some innovative changes; the trustees appended his name to the place immediately upon his death in 1870.)

Here are some photos from the last time we were in Lexington, Virginia (2006). It is really quite a pretty town – featuring not just Washington and Lee, but also the Virginia Military Institute, the alpha chapter of Sigma Nu Fraternity, Inc., and the grave of Stonewall Jackson.

Payne, Washington, and Chavis (formerly Robinson) Halls.

The Lee Memorial Chapel.

Outside Lee Chapel: Traveller’s grave.

And heraldry! This is the Washington and Lee coat of arms on Lettie Pate Evans Hall.

New Names

• I only just noticed that Swaziland, since April, has officially been the “Kingdom of Eswatini.”

• The Republic of Macedonia, formerly the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, is voting today on whether to change its name to the “Republic of North Macedonia,” to end its dispute with Greece over the name. Greece insists that “Macedonia” is much larger than the RoM, and mostly possessed by Greece, as illustrated by this map:

Wikipedia.

Language and Politics

Some notes, to complement my post from three years ago:

• On my transatlantic flight to Shannon airport I sat next to a charming young woman from County Donegal who was returning from a medical research conference in the United States and who is about to defend her dissertation at the University of Galway. Donegal contains one of the Gaeltacht areas of Ireland although she was not a native speaker of Irish (she was Xhosa, in fact), she did her duty and learned the language in school. The trouble, she told me, is that each of the three west coast Gaeltacht areas (Ulster, Connacht, and Munster) speak a different dialect of Irish, and they’re all different enough to cause problems. So when you go to take your final exam, there’s no guarantee that the person examining you will be speaking the same dialect that you’ve studied!

• Our first stop on the tour was the Dingle Peninsula, a Gaeltacht area (and home of the Munster dialect). There were plenty of signs in the language although I think I overheard it being spoken exactly once. Our guide told us that many high school students come during the summers and stay for two weeks in an Irish-speaking home, on a government-sponsored program to help promote the language. On a coach tour of the peninsula we stopped at St. Caitlín’s (i.e., Catherine’s) Church in the village of Ventry, which was distinguished by being the resting place of its longtime priest Pádraig Ó Fiannachta, who died in 2016 and who is responsible for translating the Bible into Irish. According to our guide, he was the first person ever to accomplish this feat. I thought, surely not – surely someone translated it before? Turns out that there have been previous translations, but Ó Fiannachta’s was the first Roman Catholic one (prior to Vatican II, of course, a Latin Bible was all that a good Catholic really needed). A stained glass window in the church commemorates Monsignor ó Fiannachta and specifically compares him to St. Jerome, who had originally translated the Bible into Latin in the fifth century.

• As I noted before, most personal names and most place names are translatable. That is, if you’re speaking in English, you use the English version, and if you’re speaking in Irish, you use the Irish version. Exceptions exist, of course: being a native Irish speaker and scholar, Pádraig Ó Fiannachta is so called, never “Patrick Finnerty.” The Gaeltacht village of Lispole has been spared having its name rendered as such on this road sign:

Note how the other place names are given: Irish version first, in Title Case and italics, and English version second, in ALL CAPS and roman. This convention is a good one: it produces a clear distinction between the versions and probably cuts down on confusion, and hearkens back to the time when Irish required its own font.

• A number of other Irish names and words are standard when speaking English. I jotted down a few:

  • Oireachtas Éireann (the Irish legislature), comprising the Seanad Éireann and the Dáil Éireann
  • Teachta Dála (a member of the Dáil)
  • The political parties Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and Sinn Féin
  • Garda Síochána (the police)
  • Taoiseach (Prime Minister, but note that his ceremonial superior is simply the President)
  • Tánaiste (the deputy Prime Minister)
  • Brú na Bóinne (the “Palace of the Boyne,” which I’ll be writing more about)
  • Amhrán na bhFiann,” the national anthem, which is sung in Irish (although there is an English equivalent called “A Soldier’s Song.”)
  • The transportation companies Bus Éireann and Aer Lingus
  • RTE, that is, the national broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann
  • Éire (not “Ireland”) appears on postage stamps

Also, county names appear only in Irish on the number plates:

Cork

Kerry

Louth

• But note that the town of Dingle, which the Irish minister for Community, Rural, and Gaeltacht Affairs ordered in 2005 be known only by the Irish version of its name (“An Daingean”) held a plebiscite the following year to reverse this decision, and overwhelmingly voted to return to the bilingual place name dispensation. As one man stated: “People feel they are being bullied. They have lived with ‘Dingle’ all their lives.” Methinks tourism branding might have had something to do with it as well. If the place has been known and advertised as one thing, why mess with it? Not to mention that there already is a “Daingean” in Ireland, the seat of Co. Offaly.

• Our guide in Dublin Castle pointed out that most place names in English are simply phonetic renderings of the Irish names. The English generally didn’t bother to translate what the names actually meant. Thus did “Dubhlinn” become “Dublin,” and not “Blackpool” (which is what the name means, and which refers to a dark pool on the River Poddle near where it enters the Liffey). But why, I asked, is the Irish name for Dublin actually “Baile Átha Cliath” (pronounced “bally a klee”)? That, she told me, comes from a different geographical feature at a different site: a “hurdled ford” further up the River Liffey. (“Bally,” I discover, simply means “place of,” hence Ballyduff, Ballygally, Ballymena, Ballymoney, etc. But I don’t think that “Ballyackley” ever existed as an English name.)

Apparently Dubhlinn was the Viking settlement, and Áth Cliath the native Irish one; one name stuck in English, and the other in Irish. History is full of these sorts of nomenclatural weirdnesses.

• But for a real naming dispute, you have to travel to the North, where “Are you Derry or Londonderry?” is a question one can ask in that particular city, by means of inquiring which “community” one belongs to.* That is, the nationalists prefer Derry, while the unionists Londonderry. Note that this is a dispute in English: the Irish equivalent of Derry is Doire, and presumably you could call it Londaindoire in Irish if you wanted to, although I highly doubt anyone ever does. According to Wikipedia, it wasn’t that big a deal prior to the advent of the Troubles (viz. the “Apprentice Boys of Derry“), at which time it became a shibboleth. I saw signs in the Republic reading “Doire DERRY” in the prescribed typography noted above, and I actually saw a “Londonderry” sign in the North, that is, some nationalists had gotten to it and effaced the offending prefix.

In the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement, how to solve this impasse? Many people say “Derry-Londonderry,” and I saw it written out “Derry/Londonderry” more than a few times. Our guide said that this has given rise to the jocular nickname “Stroke City.” I think that a good compromise would be to call the city “Derry” (it has a nationalist majority which naturally took control of the place once the gerrymandering was abolished) and the county “Londonderry” (there never was a “County Derry”).**

Failing that, you can always use the name of the local river and its estuary as an avoidance strategy, as does this place:

• At the time of the Romans, some of the people inhabiting what is now Scotland were known as the Picts, and spoke a Celtic language related Welsh and Breton (a Brittonic, or P-Celtic language). The Scots themselves were originally from Northern Ireland and settled western Scotland in the early Middle Ages, founding the kingdom of Dalraida. Thus is the country known today as Scotland, and Scottish Gaelic is a Goidelic, or Q-Celtic language, related to Irish and Manx. If this language was reintroduced into Northern Ireland as a result of the Scottish settlement in the seventeenth century, I saw no evidence of it. But I did see some signs in “Ulster Scots,” which some people hold up as the official minority language of Northern Ireland, and which, as far as they are concerned, is due the same amount of protection and promotion that the Republic lavishes on the Irish language. The trouble, as our guide pointed out, is that Ulster Scots “doesn’t really exist,” and I think she is right. Here is the opening paragraph for “Lunnonderrie” in Wikipedia:

Lunnonderry, kent by monie fowk as Derry, is the seicont mukkilest ceitie in Northren Ireland (eftir Belfast) an the fowert-mukkilest ceitie on the iland o Ireland. In the 2001 Census the ceitie proper haed 83,652 indwallers.

The ceitie ligs in the nor’wast o Northren Ireland naur the mairch wi Coonty Dunnygal, whilk is pairt o the Republic o Ireland. The ceitie is naur the mooth o Loch Foyle an kivers baith banks o the River Foyle. The auld wawd ceitie o Derry is on the wast bank o the River Foyle. The wast bank is aften kent as “Ceitiesyd” whyls the aest bank is aften kent as “Wattirsyd”.

In other words, it is English, with its speakers’ accent rendered phonetically, and certain dialect words that you might recognize (“kent,” “mukkilest”) if you have ever had to read Chaucer, Langland, or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

But as a result of the Good Friday Agreement and the spirit of outreach that it has promoted, Irish has been finding more and more of a place in Northern Ireland.

* Apparently the name of the eighth letter of the alphabet also marks the distinction, at least according to an article from the Guardian from 2013:

Almost two thousand years later we are still split, and pronouncing H two ways: “aitch”, which is posh and “right”; and “haitch”, which is not posh and thus “wrong”. The two variants used to mark the religious divide in Northern Ireland – aitch was Protestant, haitch was Catholic, and getting it wrong could be a dangerous business.

UPDATE (8/18): the article in front of “H-Block” in this sentence from the Irish Independent, if it isn’t just an error, suggests that “haitch” still prevails in some parts of Ireland:

Its programme included a talk by the leaders of ‘The Great Escape’, when 38 IRA prisoners broke out of a H-Block in Long Kesh in 1983.

** One slight problem with this is that “County Londonderry” doesn’t really exist anymore, except for ceremonial purposes. All across the UK, in the 1970s, local government was reorganized, producing bogus “counties” like “West Midlands,” “Tyne and Wear” or, in Northern Ireland, “Causeway Coast and Glens.” I respect the way that the Republic has not meddled with these historic subdivisions (even though they are a legacy of English imperialism!). I was reading a newspaper article on the abortion referendum and noted a map of the results: populous counties (most notably, Dublin) had been subdivided into smaller units, while sparsely populated counties had been amalgamated (e.g. Sligo and Leitrim, if I’m not misremembering). But note that the counties themselves retain their territorial integrity. Up the Republic!

Naming Names

In God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (2003), author Adam Nicholson commented on the several principles that the translators adopted to guide their work. One that I always found amusing was that:

The names of the Profyts and the holie Wryters, with the other Names in the text to be retayned, as near as may be, according as they are vulgarly used.

Some Puritans maintained that the names of the great figures in the scriptures, all of which signify something – Adam meant ‘Red Earth’, Timothy ‘Fear-God’ – should be translated. The Geneva Bible, which was an encyclopedia of Calvinist thought… had a list of those meanings at the back and, in imitation of those signifying names, Puritans, particularly in their heartlands of Northamptonshire and the Sussex Weald, had taken to naming their children after moral qualities…. Puritan children at Warbleton in Sussex, the heartland of the practice, laboured under the names of Eschew-evil, Lament, No-merit, Sorry-for-sin, Learn-wisdom, Faint-not, Give-thanks and, the most popular, Sin-deny, which was landed on ten children baptised in the parish between 1586 and 1596. One family, the children of the curate Thomas Hely, would have been introduced by their proud father as Much-mercy Hely, Increased Hely, Sin-deny Hely, Fear-not Hely and sweet little Constance Hely.

Naming people with compressed sentences was more than a Hebrew custom: it was widely practiced throughout the ancient Near East, especially in the form of “theophoric” names; that is, names that invoked the protection of some deity. Thus, around the Fertile Crescent, we find:

Sennacherib (“Sin has replaced the brothers”) of Assyria
Ashurbanipal (“Ashur created an heir”) of Assyria
Nebuchadnezzar (“Nabu save my firstborn”) of Babylon
Nabonidus (“Nabu is praised”) of Babylon
Amenhotep (“Amen is pleased”) of Egypt
Ramesses (“Ra gave him birth”) of Egypt
Balthazar (“Baal protects the king”) of Phoenicia

Any Hebrew name ending in -el is theophoric (El being “God”), thus:

Michael, Who is like God?
Daniel, God is my judge
Nathaniel, Gift of God
Raphael, God heal
Gabriel, God is my strength
Emmanuel, God is with us

And any name that begins with Jo- (like Jonathan or Joshua), or ends with -yahu (like Netanyahu) is a reference to Yahweh, the personal name of God (but changed slightly, so that we don’t actually say it).

Speaking of which, this name, given as יהוה and usually transliterated YHVH, is usually rendered as “the LORD” in most translations of the Old Testament, out of respect to the Jewish tradition of not vocalizing it. Of course, Jehovah’s Witnesses do not follow this custom: they think it’s no matter at all to use God’s personal name, and will render יהוה (the so-called “tetragrammaton”) as “Jehovah.” Unfortunately, this is not how most scholars would pronounce it today: if it must be vocalized, it’s “Yahweh” (Hebrew, like most Semitic alphabets, does not have vowels, and if no one ever said God’s name aloud, people forgot how exactly to pronounce it.) So the Jehovah’s Witnesses are stuck with an obsolete pronunciation of God’s name.

I guess this is one argument against saying it.

I suppose the most familiar example of compressed-sentence names (with or without a theophoric element) are those of certain Native Americans, like John Running Deer or Dances-with-Wolves. I do not think that the Puritan custom of giving children such names as The-Lord-Is-My-Shepherd or Sin-No-More is due for a revival any time soon.

Roman Names

Roman male names are usually composed of three elements, as in “Gaius Julius Caesar.” In this case, Gaius (the praenomen) was his personal name, Julius (the nomen) the name of his gens (clan, or extended family), and Caesar (the cognomen) was a nickname, to distinguish him from all the other Gaii of the Julian clan. Originally cognomina were unique to the individual, but they quickly became hereditary, designating a particular family within the gens. I tell my students that a rough equivalent would be someone named “John MacTavish of Kintyre” – a John, member of clan MacTavish, residing in Kintyre (as opposed to any MacTavishes living in Arran, Islay, or Mull). The hereditary nature of the cognomen perhaps gave rise to a fourth element, the agnomen, a name that also designated a particular individual, as in Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus (although agnomina could also become hereditary, or be reused, particularly when they designated victory titles like Africanus, Germanicus, or Britannicus).

Some people never took cognomina, such as Titus Livius (Livy) or Gaius Marius (Marius).

It seems that most Romans are known in English by English versions of their nomina:

Publius Virgilius Maro – Virgil
Publius Ovidius Naso – Ovid
Gauis Suetonius Tranquillus – Suetonius
Tiberius Claudius Caesar – Claudius
Quintus Horatius Flaccus – Horace

However, some names are derived from cognomina, e.g. (and see below):

Publius Cornelius Tacitus – Tacitus
Marcus Porcius Cato – Cato (the Elder)
Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix – Sulla
Marcus Junius Brutus – Brutus
Gaius Julius Caesar – Caesar

At least one is derived from a praenomen:

Tiberius Julius Caesar – Tiberius

And another from an agnomen:

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus – Augustus

What got me thinking about this whole issue was the number of Romans known in English by -ian names, such as:

Octavian, Vespasian, Domitian, Hadrian, Gordian, Valerian, Julian, Diocletian, Jovian, or Justinian

These of course are shortened from -ianus; Octavian was known as Octavianus in Latin. All of these, apparently, were cognomina. From an article on “Roman Naming Conventions”:

Some males had a cognomen that ends in –anus, which was adapted from and commemorated a nomen, sometimes their maternal family or—if they were adopted—their original paternal family. For instance, Vespasian’s nomen (Flavius) came from his father’s nomen. His cognomen (Vespasianus), on the other hand, was derived from his mother’s nomen, Vespasia. Others had cognomina that were derived not from the nomen, but the cognomen of their mothers’ families. For instance, Caracalla’s maternal grandfather was Julius Bassianus, but Caracalla’s cognomen was not Julianus, but rather Bassianus as well.

And Octavian only became Octavian when he was adopted posthumously by Julius Caesar. Born Gaius Octavius Thurinus, he became Gaius Julius Caesar in 44 BC, but known as Octavianus in honor of his birth nomen, and to distinguish him from his adoptive father.