At 3:29:31 AM on Saturday, May 3, 2014,
anthonyappleyard@... wrote:
> Sorry if I am off-topic here, but does anyone know the
> Primitive Irish (i.e. as spoken about Julius Caesar's
> time) forms of the Irish surnames Niall and Néill?
Neither of those is a surname: <Níall> is an Old Irish
forename, and <Néill> is its genitive. (There were no
surnames that early.) My resources are limited, but so far
as I can tell, the etymology of the name <Níall> is unknown,
and no attested ogam name can be definitely identified with
it, so any Prim. Irish version would be highly conjectural.
Since no one else has said anything, I’ll have a go, but you
should take it with a large dose of salt.
There is one possible early instance. The ogam inscription
KNICK/1/1 in the CISP database, dated by Ziegler to 400-550,
has been expanded as MAQI NILI. According to Ziegler, NILI
must be the genitive of an o-stem, corresponding either to
OIr. <Níall> or to OIr. <Nél> (gen. <Níuil>), from <nél>
'cloud'. In the former case it must be a mistake for *NELI,
a mistake that is easy to make in ogam. If this ogam name
does correspond to OIr. <Néill>, my best guess is that the
Prim. Ir. nominative and genitive are /nēlah/ and /nēli/,
respectively, though it may be that the /l/ ought to be
geminated. Note, though, that this is based on a pretty
cursory look at the declensions in David Stifter’s
_Sengoídelc: Old Irish for Beginners_ and the discussion of
phonology in Thurneysen.
Brian