Talk:Conn O'Neill (died 1601)

No fada in Iarla

I don't believe iarla--Irish for 'earl'--has the diacritic in its spelling. JackMason1 (talk) 15:49, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Weird how people would be ashamed to misspell a common vocabulary word in French or German, but not Irish. Shows how little respect there is for Irish. It's viewed as "not a real language". JackMason1 (talk) 06:35, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi Jack, I don't speak Irish, so I don't have the authority to say whether the word should have the diacritic or not. I took the spelling from historian Hiram Morgan - https://www.dib.ie/biography/oneill-hugh-a6962 SkywalkerEccleston (talk) 07:44, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

This just proves my point. Nobody asked you to establish a standard. You never even considered that an existing standard might already exist. You never considered consulting any of the state-sponsored dictionaries.

Why would anyone assume that Morgan, a historian writing exclusively in English, would be a competent authority to rely upon for questions of Irish language?

I don't want to stress the importance of Morgan too much. There are multiple possible paths that could have led to this error. It could be his editor that introduced this error. It happens.

But Morgan does have a reputation as belonging to the revisionist school of Irish historiography, so I can't say that I am entirely surprised. This is the type of error that you would expect to find from someone with that point of view. Certainly some wiki users will insist on interpreting it that way, so to that it extent it constitutes an unnecessary distraction from the text itself.

But, of course, there are reasons other than political bias that could account for this error. When writing for popular audiences, there is generally a certain allowance given for something like "puffery", a kind of marketing-motivated relaxation of ordinary standards. Like, you wouldn't be surprised to see a popular history of the Elizabethan era titled something like "The Faery Queene", to evoke something of the aesthetic of the period.

But Wikipedia is a standard reference work. Outside of direct quotes of contemporary documents, you would expect Wikipedia to refer to her as "Queen Elizabeth", in conformity with modern standard spelling. Certainly you would not expect the title of her article to be "Queene Bess".

Why should we have a different, lesser standard for the use of the Irish language on Wikipedia? It's a real language with a real academy behind it, with real standards. JackMason1 (talk) 08:09, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

Skywalker, I consider you one of the better contributors to Wikipedia's Irish history content, so I hope you take it as a compliment that I'd like to share an important principle relating to translated material that I've gathered from a favorite book of mine, "Aistrigh go Gaeilge" by Maolmhaodhóg Ó Ruairc, a professional translator for the United Nations. It's that the translator's goal must be fidelity to the essential meaning and linguistic register of the original text as a whole, rather than an atomistic calque of its individual components.

Or, in other words, deviation from literal translation is justified only by the need to resolve a lexical gap, an ambiguity in meaning.

Sure, we're talking in this case not about a full-blown translation per se, but its integral component element, orthography. But I see no reason to deviate from this general principle even if the scope of its application is somewhat narrower than in the translation of a grammatically complete sentence.

There may be other cases where there is a real choice to be made between competing layers of meaning, but Mac an Iarla is not one of them. It is a simple three word phrase, comprised entirely of basic vocabulary terms, with very unambiguous meaning, referring to a very specific set of facts and individuals. The 'iarla' in question is Hugh O'Neill (1550-1613), bearing a ranked title in a standardized legal hierarchy created by a formally enacted patent of nobility. It's not a metaphor or some kind of nickname derived from an informal or idiosyncratic register with a secondary layer of important or ironical meaning. It's an extremely literal report that Conn was the son of the 2nd Earl of Tyrone.

So why would we go out of our way to adopt a plainly incorrect spelling? Especially since it involves introducing a diacritic that doesn't even exist in the target language, English? Transliteration exists to accommodate pronunciation of the original language to the orthography of the target language, or to subtly hint at dialectal or a possible non-standard subtext. But in this case it does neither. There is no ambiguity of meaning. Absolutely nothing is to be gained by violating the standard.

We can ask ourselves why Hiram Morgan or his editor introduced this error, but even if we could come to a definitive answer, does that mean we have to repeat it? He's not an authority on the Irish language, and in fact, there is some reason to suspect a hostility or at least indifference to it. If Morgan or someone like him were creating a Wikipedia article for Elizabeth I, he would never entitle it "Queene Bess". Again, even if we could definitively conclude that he isn't, why bother repeating a clear error that implies he might be? Just correcting the error and adhering to proper standards seems so much simpler.

If there is some concern that readers searching for this topic might have difficulty finding it on Wikipedia because they have been trained by popular media to expect the incorrectly accented "I", isn't that something that is better handled by a re-direct or note about nomenclature within the article itself? Rather than by creating a lower, double standard for Irish language materials? JackMason1 (talk) 10:56, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi Jack, thanks for providing a link to the dictionary with the correct spelling of Iarla. It is concerning that this misspelling hasn't been noticed earlier. Are you sure it can't be some kind of early Irish orthography?

I titled the article "Conn Mac An Íarla" to set it apart from the other men named Conn O'Neill. e.g. Conn O'Neill (prisoner), Conn O'Neill, 1st Earl of Tyrone and Conn Ó Néill.

Morgan is the only historian to refer to this Conn O'Neill as "Conn Mac An Íarla". He uses this name in the Dictionary of Irish Biography entry for Hugh O'Neill + in his book Tyrone's Rebellion. I am not sure which source Morgan has taken the name from - maybe an Irish chronicler referred to Conn as "Mac An Iarla" at some point during the war?

Anyway, since Morgan has spelt Iarla wrong, it does make me question the validity of the name. I SkywalkerEccleston (talk) 13:08, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

Sorry my reply was cut off. In your opinion, is it worth retitling this article to something like "Conn O'Neill (died 1601)"? SkywalkerEccleston (talk) 13:10, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

It doesn't matter if it were an early Irish form, the Wikipedia standard requires the standard modern form unless you're going for transliteration, which Morgan's choice also fails. As I mentioned with regard to Elizabeth I, her contemporaries may have written about her as "Queene", but outside of the context of directly quoting a contemporary document, no serious wiki contributors would. There may be innocent, marketing related reasons for using antique forms in other types of media, but definitely not in the titles of standard reference materials like Wikipedia.

As for the alternative of avoiding the patronymic altogether, that's a good option.

I'm not an authority on Morgan's overall oeuvre. But I do have enough knowledge of some specific things he's written about to confirm there is a strong basis for his general reputation as a revisionist historian, a term with some negative connotations in the traditionalist school. It's not that he's lax about the factual basis for his reporting, but that he is pretty consistently biased towards conclusions that undermine traditionalist, nationalist narratives.

The example that sticks out clearest in my memory is his description of Matthew O'Neill as the 'affiliative son' of Conn Bacach--implying that Matthew was not Conn's biological son. It is true that Matthew was not legitimate. But Conn himself claimed that Matthew was the result of his affair with the wife of a Dundalk blacksmith named O'Kelly, and I see no reason to doubt that.

It is true that there were precedents in the history of dynastic politics to "insert" an adopted heir into the dynastic succession when the biological line failed or an immediate crisis demanded an expedient alliance, but the case of Matthew is clearly different from those. First of all, those usurpations were implemented after the incumbent death by the derbfine, not the incumbent himself. Secondly, they were done to preserve the political integrity of the tribal structure by acquiring a strong, well-connected leader, which could not be accomplished by recruiting the bastard of a lowly blacksmith. It seems almost inconceivable that Conn himself would surrender his Irish title for an English one while simultaneously disinheriting his own biological children. If those were the terms of the deal, what exactly would Conn be protecting?

I know of no other historian that has reached the conclusion that Morgan did in that case. It's true that the appearance of an illegitimate son in a pedigree very often is a warning sign that the 'books are being cooked', so to speak. But clearly that is not ALWAYS the case, and it's hard to see Conn's motivations for doing so here.

I think Morgan kind of stretched his credibility too far in that particular case. I'm pretty sure that it was Shane the Proud, Conn's legitimate son, who first cast aspersions on Matthew's paternity, so Morgan almost certainly can cite some contemporary documents making that claim. But of course Shane would say that, wouldn't he? He was extremely motivated to invalidate Matthew's succession in that particular way, as English law barred bastards from succession but Irish law did not differentiate between illegitimate and legitimate issue. He had to go super big with his claims in order to cover all his bases. JackMason1 (talk) 15:22, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

I will move this article to "Conn O'Neill (died 1601)". I'll keep the patronymic in the article text but I'll correct the spelling. SkywalkerEccleston (talk) 22:25, 1 October 2024 (UTC)