Sub-Roman Britain (Cavalry etc)

[cagwinn]

As for sources, Alanus and others have liberally plastered the website with good ones and with good perceptive comment. Are you suggesting that the Alan name indicates "furry fox person" all the way from Britanny ferries to Moesia to Ossetia?

Well, I named my son Bran (raven) but his hair is not exactly black.. Nor does he have wings, btw.
IF the name Alan in Brittany and elsewhere has any connections with the tribal group (as you suggest, and you are following Malcor & Littleton here), where is the proof? I mean, it sounds alike, but is there any other tribal group which name is used in a similar fashion? Rom for Roman, Vik for Viking, Sarm for Sarmatian? I think not. I have seen such tribal names used as a last name or epithet. Such as X 'the Alan', or X 'of the Alani', but not as given name.
The one exception would be Frank, but there we already have an exception, because the name 'frank' also means 'sincere or truthful'.

My guess would be that this is yet another case of the hasty theory: "it sounds like... so it must be...".

Hi Robert,
The Breton name Alan can hardly come from Latin Ala:nus, or its Alanic original, since both had a long final -a:- and would have produced *Alon in Old Breton, *Aleun in Middle Breton.

As mentioned by Leon Fleuriot (Les origines de la Bretagne, p. 204), the name Alan should rather be linked with Welsh elain, plural alanedd, "young deer, doe" (from Brittonic *elani:, pl. *eleaniias or *alani:, pl. *alaniias; compare Irish elit "hind" from Proto-Irish *alanti- or *elanti) and the Welsh plant name alan(n) "coltsfoot", though the linguist Eric Hamp suggests that the Celtic *alan- meant "colt" originally and not "deer" (which fellow linguist Peter Schrijver does not necessarily agree with). Breton Alan could, thus, be derived from a Brittonic masculine noun *alanos "(young) buck" (or "colt", if we follow Hamp), with its corresponding feminine form *alani: "doe" surviving as Welsh elain.

See Peter Schrijver, Studies in British Celtic Historical Phonology, pp. 78-79 for a discussion:
[url:2bdtj6v7]http://books.google.com/books?id=f_RMQkk3OSIC&pg=PA78#v=onepage&q=&f=false[/url]

As has been alluded to, Alanik is a Breton diminutive form of the name Alan and used poetically to refer to the fox; the exact origin of this usage is debated (Julius Pokorny grouped all of the various Indo-European cognates of W. elain and Irish elit under the PIE root *el- "red, brown", so that may be relevant here - perhaps *alan- was a Celtic root used for any red/brown colored animal - but not all linguists agree with Pokorny's grouping; Hamp favors a derivation of a Celtic root *al- from PIE *plH- "colt").

UPDATE: It should be noted, too, that the suffix -an in Neo-Brittonic also acted as a diminutive (most Celticists propose that it was borrowed from Early Irish -agn-, which gave Old Irish -a'n), so Breton Al-an could mean "Little Al" (where Al- is either a root word or a pet form of some longer name beginning in Al-).