Burnside of Duntrune: An Essay in Praise of Ordinariness

Abstract

N ames, and place names in particular, have long been recognized as very special raw material for the study of linguistic stratification and settlement history. Their potential longevity, their often amazing power of survival, their ability to outlive the languages that coined them and the lexica from which they were coined provide them with an aura of fascination, and even the most hard-headed name scholar or linguist cannot help succumbing, on occasion, to what may almost be termed the romance of names. Exploring and exploiting this fascinating potential has therefore, in the course of the last two centuries, become the legitimate pursuit, if not the all-absorbing pre-occupation, of scholar and layman alike. As a result, our understanding of the nature of names has been greatly enhanced, our methods in handling them been greatly refined, and our strategies in laying bare their secrets become much more sophisticated. It is probably no exaggeration to claim that much of this undoubted fascination of names and most of the very keen, and sometimes very passionate, interest taken in them by an ever-growing number of people I stem from a desire to make transparent what is opaque, to recover, or at least to establish, meaning for the meaningless, and to gain access to a seemingly inaccessible past. The investigation of names, demanding, as it does, the careful piecing together of scraps of evidence, from the earliest spelling to the modern pronunciation, pleases or arouses the detective that is in all of us, and the devices and successes of onomastic etymology become the appealing trappings of stealthy stalking and dramatic disclosure. Solving, to our own satisfaction if not necessarily to that of others, the Case of the Mysterious River Name creates a sense of achievement not easily rivaled by any other intellectual endeavor, and having solved it, we are not going to be stopped from taking on another case, and yet another, and another ... , and we are not easily persuaded that sometimes our skills do not quite match our tasks. Indeed, so strong is our concentration on the spectacular that we tend to ignore, or at least neglect, those names which do not challenge the