Saint Patrick & Names along the Antonine wall

[MonsGraupius]

Yes, the endings are different. The words themselves are different too. Ignoring the endings doesn't make them the same!

If you can tell me what the word endings in use in Strathclyde Welsh and can show me how they would be translated into Gaelic, Irish and Latin, then you might have a point. But as we don't. About the only thing that the endings tell us is the gender of the words ... it is otherwise pretty useless, which is why the endings get ignored.

Are you proposing that every thing that only has a single source is rejected as false?

Of course not. But some sources are more reliable and better supported than others. Anonymous religious texts written hundreds of years after the fact are notoriously unreliable, as we've discussed before.

So, you accept that a single source cannot be just dismissed. But what about a single source, which is corroborated by the place names as is the TRIPLE fit between Muildy=Medio, NEMETON=Nemthur=Neutur=Notyr and Dobiadon=Dumbarton?

I am beginning to think that if I went to Old Kilpatrick and found in the ground a signpost saying "NEMETON" you'd still say: "But it's only a single source".

And what is your evidence it came from one source? None at all! It's just pure speculation.

Because... it's all from one source?

How do you know they are not independently coming to the same conclusion based on three different sources?
Does it say in the text: "I found from [single-source] that the name was Nemthur?"

You might be assuming there was some 'lost source' or other that informed both Fiach, his scholiast, and those who came after him - but that would indeed be 'pure speculation'!

The early Irish were very keen on preserving anything they could find about Patrick. If there were other sources available about his origins, I expect they would have been preserved too. But the earliest sources don't tell us anything about where he was born, just where he was captured.

Texts get lost, texts get burnt. Floods occur. Less used texts get recycled. Over time the number of sources decrease. We cannot say that just because we only know of one source, that at the time of writing there was only one source unless we have EVIDENCE to show there was only one source.

This place, 'Bannavem Taburniae' (which Mirchu tells us is now called 'Ventre' - whatever that means!) is completely unidentifiable.

V=N -> Nentre AKA neutur AKA nemturri

Although I must say it sounds very much like Tafarn-y-Banwen (Banwen = Banuen / Taburnaie = Tafarn) to me, so if I was going to play the guess-the-garbled-placename I'd go for that one!

Tafarn-y-Banwen looks to me too far from the sea to be even one of the "also ran" contenders.

However, whilst his birthplace is at Nemthur in Strathclyde, there is nothing in what Patrick writes that excludes the possibility that his Grandfather's home was elsewhere. Indeed, all we can really say is that by the argument that Patrick was not a native speaker of Latin so probably was born outside any Latin speaking area, his Grandfather had a Latin name, so it is possible that this was a Latin speaking area "near the sea" exposed to Irish raiders.

All I can really say is that the sources are quiet as to how far apart Nemthur and Bannavem Tabernniae were.

Patrick was not a native Latin speaker... he had access to Latin texts, but like all immigrants ...

So you concede that he must have been reading in Latin, at least? So he was able to read, and had been educated to some degree in Latin... and his family had Latin names... and they were Christian clergy... and he refers to himself, obliquely at least, as a Roman and says his family lived in Britain...

I don't see anything here to suggest he was not from sub-Roman Britain! If he was an 'immigrant', then where was he immigrating to? The Kingdom of Strathclyde did not exist until a century or two later.

First as Calgacus makes clear, Briton was all of what we now call Britain. Briton wasn't England.

We have to go on the evidence. Patrick's father and grandfather had Latin names and whilst Patrick was far from fluent in Latin, he clearly learnt some Latin. If he started life in Strathclyde, was kidnapped to Ireland, made his way back, went back to Ireland as a missionary ...
Where does he learn his barbarous Latin?

You have to postulate that he was taught "barbarous" Latin by his father - who wasn't himself fluent in Latin - or that there was a small community of "barbarous" Latin speakers in Strathclyde which would fit a small, relatively isolated community formed largely from runaway slaves and persecuted religious groups like Christians (who tended to be from the lower orders of society). Slaves would often not be native Latin speakers. So, whilst the only language runaway slaves would have in common was Latin, what they spoke would be far from eloquent. In effect it would be a creole.