Uí Fiachroí Foltsnáthaig?

[Webmaster]

Everything I can find says that Fiachrach is not the correct genitive case for Fiachrae. Fiachrach would appear to be the genitive case for Fiachru or possibly Fiachra. But the oldest records indicate the give name was Fiachrae, not Fiachra, and:

Fiachrae -> Fiachrai or Fiachrad

Here are some exemplars:

Echu -> Echach
Fiachu -> Fiachach (one of Niall Noígíallach's sons)
umae -> umai,"copper"
tengae -> tengad, "tongue"

So Fiachrach would appear to be an error due to using Fiachra as the nominative case name instead of Fiachrae. So, the dynastic name should be either Uí Fiachrai or Uí Fiachrad.

But even further, Fiachrae appears to be a corruption of Fiachróe, "battlefield+raven", and the genitive case here would be Fiachroí, so the original dynastic name should be Uí Fiachroí. The ending may have later become conflated with the French word roi, "king", so a misunderstanding of the Gaelic name Fiachróe -> Fiachroí developed, which led to a bad translation of the name as "raven king".

Foltsnáthaig is the genitive case for Foltsnáthach, Fiachróe's epithet or cognomen. Unless there are objections or documentation that contradicts the above, I plan on changing all the labels across the website to Uí Fiachroí, etc.

[BuckeyeMike]

This makes perfect sense David. Being a novice at genitives, I would get someone confused between 'Fiachrach' and 'Fiachrae' because of the apparent grammatical difference. I just blew it off as my own misunderstanding.

[Webmaster]

Mike,

Thanks. Languages with different noun cases that cause spelling changes are difficult for me, since there really appears to be no need for them. No matter how difficult people say English is, it sure seems easier to me than languages like Old Irish. I mean, it even caused problems for the scholars and scribes back in the day, which is why there are so many spelling variants of the same name in the records.