Some typical terms found in Manx place-names include the following.

Unlike the Manx Language which shows virtually no traces of Norse influence, the place-names of the Island still reflect the more than three hundred years of Norse influence (900-1265) as well as the language of the Gaelic-speaking majority population. Later place-names reflect the growing English domination from the 15th century onwards and the death of the Manx Language from the mid 19th century. The originals of many of the names shared, though in differing forms, by Man and the Hebrides travelled South during the Viking period; they were single names or patronymics, not inherited beyond one generation. Others, equally Gaelic or Scandinavian, arrived later in a more or less crystallised form, and in contrast with the first comers, did not take shape or even alter much in the Island.

  1. Gaelic : Scottish and North Irish.
  2. Scandinavian : Norse, Icelandic, and possibly Danish, all with a strong Gaelic infusion added chiefly from the Hebrides and Dublin.
  3. English : (a) Pre-Derby. (b) Derby, etc., up to the Revestment. (c) Recent.

In the corruption of native forms, in the tendency to translate them, and in the addition of English surnames to the prefix Balla, that the complete ascendancy of English as a means of communication has affected Manx placenames. The bulk of them remains Gaelic or Scandinavian, but their comparative frequency is no guide to the proportionate strength of these two strains in the people.

Manx surnames, have a philological rather than an ethnological value, except for the fact that those which are recognisably English have always been strongest in the South-East, where Castletown was the seate of government and the principal port, and where the Abbey maintained relations with its parent monastery in Furness.

 

As in the Highlands and Ireland, Scandinavian names are found disguised by the prefixing of mac (now surviving in Man only as initial C, K and Q), and further transformed in some cases by Manx pronunciations and consequent spellings. Crennell and Crellin, e.g., both represent MacRanald (Rognwald). In the same way the Norsemen, partly prior to the Viking period, adopted a small number of Gaelic names, of which their Kormak and Dufan, and perhaps Njal and Finn, may be taken as specimens; and non-hereditary names reaching Man thus indirectly from a Gaelic source may have furnished the bases of corresponding Manx surnames.

During the later part of Shetland’s Pictish history, other Celtic peoples came to Shetland. Handwritten script is another literary type with or without the Gothic alphabet which replaced some Ogham but was largely brough by a version of Latin, read to be written although more limited than a symbol itself; P or R, C or G, O or Q, etc.

G was added to the Romance languages to suffice C as in the Caledonii or Galli.

Further, and especially in the North of the Island, of the two divisions, English and non-English, the latter has derived some of its members from Scandinavian sources, so it is often difficult to decide whether a name primarily Scandinavian may have reached the Island by way of the Western Isles, of Dublin or of the North of England. A few Scandio-Manx names must have migrated at an early period into the surrounding regions, especially into Cumbria and North Lancashire.

It is possible that a few Celtic names took on a Scandinavian cast in the Island itself, though the vocabulary of modern Manx, and in a slightly lesser measure the place-names, argue to the contrary. To separate the two classes, Gaelic and Scandinavian, by an inflexible line is clearly impossible, since the two races became so closely associated in the Hebrides, and perhaps to some extent in Ireland, before the settlement of the Island. It may well be that the greater portion of any Gaelic blood now flowing in the veins of the Manx people was introduced during the Norse ascendancy.

 

In making these comparisons between English and non-English names, however, several considerations have to be borne in mind. A Manx name may reshape itself into an English one, as Hudgeon into Hudson, Moughtin into Morton. A large number of surnames entered the Island from England, and a few from the Scottish Lowlands, before the Revestment need not surprise us, since so far back as the 14th century British rulers and the representatives appointed by them were introducing officials, clergy, soldiers, servants and adventurers. Besides their linguistic changes, the early forms which we have to rely on have been at the mercy of scribes and clerks, some or them Manx perhaps, but others English who were writing down the sounds or a foreign language.

(1) The figures stand for names as such, and not for the frequency of their occurrence.
(2) In certain descriptions of official documents the names of the English dominating class have an undue preponderance.
(3) The Roll does not by any means contain all the surnames or patronymics then in use in the Island, and most of the absentees, the non-landholders, would be Manxmen.

4) In a proportion of cases the resemblances between Manx and English names are accidental; there are Cains and Caines, Callows, Cowens, Cowleys, Cannells, and other pairs of duplicates on both sides of the channel which have no connexion with each other, though it must be observed that the identity of the forms makes it impossible to say positively that no Englishman with a name which was also Manx ever established himself in the Island and perpetuated his surname.

 

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