4 i Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



true meaning of many names long since sunk to the position of arbitrary 

 labels. 



As for the distribution within Clare Island itself of the Gaelic names now 

 current there, a few may be said to be in universal use. Almost ail of the 

 islanders, old and young, English speakers and bihnguists, speak of the 

 common Bibwort Plantain as SL&n lup ; of the Bagweed as Doc^lin ; of the 

 Yellow Flag as Sellifcpin^ ; of the Silverweed as bborcin ; of the Purple 

 Loosestrife as Cue^cc^c; of the Periwinkle as p&ocAn. But many of the 

 Gaelic names are used side by side with the English names, the adidt islanders 

 preferring the Gaelic, the younger the English. Some of the older people use 

 indifferently a Gaelic or an English name. For instance, one man near the 

 Abbey in speaking to me of the Common Elder hesitated between Upom and 

 Bore-tree ; and another, when asked the name of the Broad-leaved Dock, gave 

 me both Copog and L>ocken. A stranger to Clare Island who confines his 

 inquiries to the neighbourhood of the quay or harbour is liable to fall into the 

 eiTor of supposing that Gaelic is a quite extinct language on the island. But 

 a few days spent in collecting native plant names in the remoter parts, towards 

 the north and west, will convince him that many of the islanders, and these not 

 always the really aged people, still speak the old tongue. 



Discussions on Gaelic language and folk-lore too often proceed on the mis- 

 taken assumption that all things Gaelic are necessarily of a hoary antiquity ; 

 that we must seek for Gaelic origins — say, for instance, the origin and meaning 

 of plant and animal names — in the dim azure of the past. Implicit in this 

 assumption is the notion that Gaelic is a dead and fixed language, whereas the 

 fact is that it is still living, and displaying the usual signs of life and growth 

 in the evolution of new words from its own resources and in the adoption with 

 modification of words from other languages — above all from English. So it is 

 quite possible that some of our more local Gaelic names of plants and 

 animals may be inventions of recent date. It may be, for instance, that 

 111ai]i V^-oa (Long Mary), the usual Gaelic name for the Heron on Clare 

 Island and the mainland shores of Clew Bay, is a recent coinage of some 

 local wit or playful gossoon, a coinage destined to perplex future philologers 

 when some generations of currency have blurred its outlines. Still it remains 

 undoubtedly true that the great mass of Gaelic plant and animal names, and 

 perhaps all of them now current throughout Gaelic Ireland and Scotland, are 

 of ancient origin. 



The following list of plant names is peculiar in one respect, the almost 

 complete absence from it of Clare Island names for our common indigenous 

 trees and shrubs, such as the Alder, the Hawthorn, the Broom, the Spindle- 

 tree, the Holly, the Ash, the Birch, the yuicken-tree, the Hazel, and the 



