Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Douglas McArthur

Thanks to the wealth of old Icelandicized Irish personal names it is possible to construct hiberno-Icelandic forms Irish names born by contemporary people. The name "Douglas MacArthur", for instance, can be transformed into Dufglás MagArtús.
The first element 'Duf-' means 'dark' and occurs in 'Dufgus' and 'Dufgall' (Modern English Dougall), the second is adapted as -glás.
The pet-form of Douglas, Doug, would be 'Duggi'.
Constructions of surnames beginning with 'mac-' can be formed after the example 'Magbjóður', the Icelandic form of the name MacBeth, mentioned in the book "Keltar á Íslandi" by Hermann Pálsson. The first element 'mag-'could be regareded as being an adaptation of the Gaelic word but also as the stem of 'mögur' (an old word for 'son', which is indogermanicly related to the Scottish mac). The second element is a nominative form, where one would normally expect a genive (Magartúsar), but being literary traditionalists, we prefer to stick to the example 'Magbjóður', where the second element is in the nominative form,, so Magartús instead of Magartúsar it is.

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