MacNeill — Silva Focluti. 251 



* Uluti is in fact the early form of the name Ulaidh; we have the 

 Old-Irish accusative plural Ultu < *Ulutiis, and genitive plural Uloth n- 

 <*Uluton. But Uluti IS nominative plural. "We might expect St. Patrick 

 to have written a genitive Vlutoruvi, or even TJlutum, parallel with th'e 

 uox Hiherionacitm of the same passage ; but the fact that all the variants 

 end in -ti seems fairly decisive evidence that the word originally written 

 had the same ending. My view is that St. Patrick, in latinizing an Irish 

 name, might well have used a nominative plural where a better latinist 

 would have used a genitive plural. I mention, but do not accept, the 

 possibility that he might have used Vhiti as an adjective in concord with 

 uirgulti. In the Latin inscriptions of western Britain, from Selkirkshire to 

 Devonshire, there is abundant evidence that, in the period immediately 

 following the Eoman evacuation of Britain, in the fifth, sixth, and seventh 

 centuries, the case-inflexions of Latin had quite broken down, and were 

 no longer correctly used even by the more or le.ss literate persons who 

 devised the inscriptions. A collection of such inscriptions is found in the 

 paper by the late Sir John Pihys in Y Cymmrodor, vol. xviii, where Ehys 

 has bravely sought to explain, on various grounds, the frequent absence 

 of concord. 



It is quite possible that, besides the solecisms of idiom which remain, 

 St. Patrick's writings abounded in errors of accidence, which later scribes 

 and redactors would be certain to correct. All the Mss. seem to have left 

 uncorrected an original ambulas, for the subjunctive amhides, in the passage 

 quoted. At all events, the actual readings make Uluti more likely by far 

 than Ubituvi or Ulutoruni, or an adjectival * Ulutacam, which would represent 

 the later Ultach. 



The actual variants would then have arisen as follows : — The original 

 7iluti, mistaken for a Latin word and a puzzle to the scribes, became uoluti, 

 the Latin word which most closely resembled it. When later on the editing 

 and emendation of St. Patrick's Latin was undertaken, loirgulti and ueluti 

 were independently substituted, as yielding a somewhat better sense. 

 Collation led to uirgulti uoluti and uirgulti ueluti. We can see collation 

 at work in the uirgulti uolutique and subsequent deletion of uolutique of P4. 

 The scribe of the Book of Armagh, or rather some earlier scribe in his line of 

 tradition, recognized that a place-name might be expected, and uoluti became 

 Uocluti, then Focluti. Adamnan, a century earlier, writes both Uirgnous and 

 Fergnous. 



It is remarkable that two other instances of the change of * Uluti to a 

 form bearing the guise of a Latin word are on record. Cine of these is the 

 well-known OvoXoCvtloi of Ptolemy. It is quite possible that Ptolemy 



[28*J 



