Re: Irish Placenames
Dave Postles (pot@leicester.ac.uk)
Wed, 22 Feb 1995 08:58:42 +0000
A source used by Friel for "translations" was the history of the Ordnance
Survey in nineteenth century Ireland, "A Paper Landscape" by J.H. Andrews
published by Clarendon in 1975. I saw an article in a recent _Irish Review_
arguing that Friel portrays the Survey unfairly - that on the whole they
recorded what they found. Certainly my own rather limited experience of
looking through the O.S. Memoirs (some of which have been published by the
Institute of Irish Studies here in Belfast) didn't include "renaming Gaelic
places with English equivalents" as such - Anglicised spellings of Gaelic
names, yes, but that's a different matter from translating into English.
I see from a bibliography search that there is a discussion of the issue
between Friel and Andrews in "The Crane bag", vol. 7 p. 118-124 (1983). Must
have a look at it myself!
Nicholas Whyte
Queen's University of Belfast
N.Whyte@queens-belfast.ac.uk