APEIL 77 



Another effect of letters upon our place-names before 

 the invention of printing must be taken into account. A 

 copyist's blunder sometimes takes the place of the real 

 name. None of the Western Isles bears a more musical 

 or better-known name than lona, but its creation was a 

 mere fluke. The original Gaelic name of that island was 

 a sound variously represented in early Irish manuscripts 

 as I or Hy. After St. Columba had made it famous by 

 his sanctity and by the religious house he founded upon it, 

 it became known as Icolmkil — I Coluim cille — I of Colum 

 of the church. But Adamnan, writing Columba's hfe in 

 Latin, coined an adjectival form of I, and referred to it 

 as lovM insula — the louan island, just as we speak now 

 of the Ionian Islands.^ Some copyist mistook u for 

 n, and there you have the pretty and permanent name 

 lona. 



The familiar name of Hebrides had a similar origin. 

 Ptolemy, in the second century of our era, wrote of the 

 Ebudse, Solinus of the Hebudes (the aspirate was a snare 

 long before the evolution of Cockneys). Now the small i. 

 (the Greek iota) carried no dot over it till the eleventh 

 century; it was a venial oifence, therefore, in an early 

 transcriber to mistake Ptolemy's u for ri, and so turn his 

 Ebudse into Ebridse.^ 



No sooner had the Komans evacuated Britain early in 

 the fifth century than the land began to be overrun by 

 people of another speech, which was destined ultimately 

 to obliterate, at all events in Southern Britain, nearly all 

 trace of the languages which went before it. It will be 



' Of the seven MSS. of Adamnan's work examined by Dr. Reeves, four 

 give the correct form loua, and two later ones have lona. 



2 Curiously enough, another instance of this confusion occurred in this 

 very paragraph, Solinus having been rendered by the printer Solirius. 



