[ANSTHRLD] A question about Charles Bardsley's _A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames_

kobrien at texas.net kobrien at texas.net
Mon Oct 2 14:04:36 PDT 2006


Quoting Luciana Caterina di Boniface <dolce.luce at gmail.com>:

> I had a client looking through the book and I was asked the question I
> have
> been asking myself since first getting the book - How do you know which
> names are Welsh, and which names are English?

All of the name citations in this source are from English (or Latin) language 
records.  In his discussions of the names, he sometimes cites etymology for 
the name including what Welsh name it derived from or other similar 
information.



> I confess, I had to tell her that I did not know, but that I would find
> out.
> To give specifics on the desired name, it is <Vyvyan (pg. 51) Amary (pg.
> 657) Rowntree (pg. 785)>. I jotted down the page numbers when she showed
> me
> the specific pages, but I am looking back and am now questioning that pg
> 51 for <Vyvyan>.

Bardsley lists full names.  For example, Bardsley lists, under the header 
Peregrine:

Peregrinus Bernard 

dated to 1273. This entry could be used to document <Peregrinus> as a given 
name or <Bernard> as a byname.

This is a good example of why just a page number or just a header name is not 
real useful in documentation.  We need to know what page 51 says about 
<Vyvyan>, etc.  My bet is that the entry on p. 51 has <Vyvyan> as a given 
name and the entry is discussing the byname in that entry.  However, I seem 
to recall that <Vivian> was a masculine name in period.  Checking Withycombe, 
or even an entry in Bardsley or Reaney & Wilson (header something like 
Vivian) would probably tell us if I'm remembering correctly.  If so, that is 
probably something the submitter would want to know.

Then the question comes up of whether the name elements all date to similar 
time periods and whether they can be combined to form a period or 
registerable name.

Also, the full text of the cited name can give us an idea of the language of 
the original record.  For example, in the example I use above, given that the 
date is 1273 and the Latin ending of <-us> on <Peregrinus> the original 
record is almost certainly Latin or a mostly-Latinized English record.

Hope this helps,

Mari
 





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