The Gaelic Place-Names of Carloway, Isle of Lewis: Their Structure and Significance (review)

This impressive volume aims to understand the structure and historical development of over 3000 toponyms collected by the author from an area of ca. 150 square kilometers in the west of Lewis, one of the northernmost islands in the Hebrides chain to the northwest of the Scottish mainland. These names are of immense historical and cultural significance for the lightly populated rural communities within the registry of Carloway, which remains substantially Gaelic-speaking (though all Gaelic speakers are bilingual), especially since many of the names have already been forgotten by all but the oldest generation.

Richard A. V. Cox treats his data in two ways: (1) each toponym is considered individually in a gazetteer, and (2) the toponyms are treated as a corpus, with extensive discussion of their linguistic structures, historical development, and function as names, and a broad classification of their numerous subtypes is provided.

After some introductory discussion of both linguistic and nonlinguistic matters and the toponym as a subject of study (1–14), C turns to the treatment of his data as a corpus first (15–124). He examines (1) their internal syntactic structure, which can be complex in tokens such as Loch Dubh Druim Airigh nan Sìthean ‘the black lake of the ridge of the shieling of the knolls’, (2) their onomastic, that is, toponymic, meaning as opposed to lexical meaning, (3) their derivational and inflectional morphology, (4) the semantic usage of prepositions that occur within toponyms, for example, Geodha Gun Fheum ‘the ravine without use’, and that govern them in PPs, (5) the placement of stress, (6) phonetic phenomena that affect them, and (7) Old Norse etyma within the corpus that have been Gaelicized. The linguistic behavior of the corpus is largely consistent with the local dialect; as one might expect in an onomastic corpus, some archaisms are preserved, and there are occasionally other minor grammatical differences, for example, in the inflectional morphology and the syntax of the definite article. A large portion of this section is also devoted to a wide-ranging onomasticon of the lexical items that appear in the toponymy. The section is completed by a brief discussion of loanwords attested in the corpus—over one-third of the nomenclature is borrowed from Old Norse—and techniques for dating individual toponyms.

The largest part of the volume is the gazetteer (143–390). There are 3,816 alphabetized listings; each entry provides the toponym, its location by national grid reference numbers to four digits, the township in which it is located, a narrow phonetic transcription (with minor deviations from IPA usage), a translation, a description of the place when pertinent, etymological and/or derivational data, and information on historical documentation.

This rich and well-produced volume will be of great interest to those interested in onomastics and the Scottish Gaelic language.