Gaelic to English
| I think it is important to understand that the Irish had their own
language and culture. Most of their words are very much different
from English and surnames seem to follow a different route as well, the
Irish surnames were often a description about the offsprings
relationship to their elder while most English surnames were often about
a trade or a place. Most
Irish surnames may appear strangely in Irish Gaelic but sound almost the same
as in English. For example our family surname is Ui
Ceallaigh, the Ui is the plural form of Ua and has a long e sound our
sounds like E Kelley. Ua in Gaelic has a oo-oh sound but over time this came to be a long O
sound and is represented as O Ceallaigh and is pronounced as "O Kel Ley"
thus when translated into English very early it appeared as o Kelley. This actually makes
some very good sense. I suspect the first Irish to learn English
and have their names translated into English were traders, those who
imported and exported goods and because of their daily contact with the
English, like the modern Chinese these Irish had to learn to read and
write English in order to do business with the English and they needed
to have a name spelled in English thus Gaelic Ua Ceallaigh became
English O'Kelley. I believe the double "e" spelling was a very
early translation and it could have had even more letters as I have also
see O'Keylleye. Middle English had many extra letters to aid in
pronouncing the words and many of these words may have remained that way
if not for the invention of the printing press and the mass production
of books for profit. Words or letters were hand set and paper,
ink, and labor all costs money so to reduce expenses and make more
profit many words wee put on a diet having those unnecessary letters
taken out and because books were now mass produced for the masses the
language now had examples for its readers to follow as they created
their own books and letters. We see this today, the impact of
websites, emails, text messages, and twitter has on our written
communications. It might be surprising to some but some of the purest forms of early translations of Gaelic names can be found outside of Ireland. England was using the pain of death to force the Irish to become English and for the most part that did occur because today most Irish can no longer speak their native language and their names are spelled as the English wanted them spelled but many of those who left Ireland rather than remain and be transformed held onto to their family names or restored them after our Revolution. I am certain that our name, O'Kelley is the early English translation of Ua Ceallaigh and Kelly is the newer form forced upon the Irish by the English. To help me understand Gaelic to English transations I turned to a book by Nancy Stenson titled Basic Irish.
More Irish to English names can be found at http://www.behindthename.com/nmc/iri.php Irish Gaelic women did not take their husbands names when they married
and this was because the name described their relationship to their elder.
If Ni Murphy married Ua Ceallaigh, she was still the granddaughter of
Murphy, that relationship did not change and she was not the grandson of
Ceallaigh by marriage so to take her husband's name would have not been
valid. Nancy Stenson describes an interesting custom that
explains some of the odd DNA matches. When there were two people
in the same village that had the same name, they would take on the given
name of their father. For example let us say we had two Tomas Ua
Ceallaighs living in a villiage. One was born to Farrell Ua
Ceallaigh and the other to Conley Ua Ceallaigh. To allow the
community to know who was who, these two would be known as Tomas Mac
Farrell and Tomas Mac Conley and to complicate this more, their children
could be known as Ua Farrell and Ua Conley. |