Saint Patrick & Names along the Antonine wall

[Nathan Ross]

Grammar Of The Iberno-Celtic Or Irish Language

Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry

The life of Saint Patrick, Apostle of Ireland

You can largely ignore the ending because that usually depends on the endings in use in the various languages

All those are the same source - Fiach again.

So 'Nemturri' is the Latin translation of Fiach's nemthur. Interesting - could the turri bit come from Latin turris: tower?

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

Perhaps you are speaking from the viewpoint of the monolingual Brit for whom learning a foreign language is a chore.

ഇല്ല !