Note 845 — Chapter X · LEARNING AND LANGUAGE.

Adamnan gives us two instances of this. He says (B. i. c. 27) that the inhabitants of Skye ‘call to this day’ the river in which the Pictish chief Artbranan was baptized Dobur Artbranan, and in Cormac’s Glossary (Ir. Ar. Soc., 1868, p. 53) we find ‘Dobur is water, unde dicitur Dobarchu, i.e. water-dog, i.e. an otter;’ again, in another glossary (Gaelic Soc. Tr., Dublin, p. 12), we have ‘Dobhar, a river.’ Adamnan also tells us (B. ii. c. 38) of a peasant ‘who lived in the district which borders the shores of the Stagnum Aporicum,’ or Aporic lake, by which he means Lochaber, and placed a stake blessed by St. Columba under the water, near the beach of the river, ‘qui Latine dici potest Nigra Dea,’ and caught a salmon of extraordinary size. The river Lochy, which flows from Loch Lochy, and pours its waters into the Linnhe Loch, near Fort-William, answers best to the description of this salmon river in Lochaber. The word Lochy, however, has no connection with the term loch, translated by Adamnan ‘stagnum,’ for the vowel o in the former is long, and in the latter short; but Cormac and O’Clery’s Glossaries (Ir. Ar. Soc., 1868, p. 100) have loch with the o long, meaning dubh, or black. Dea is here not the Latin word signifying goddess, but an Irish river-name. Thus, in the Book of Armagh, St. Patrick lands at the Ostium Deæ, by which the river Vartry, in Wicklow, is meant; and the same place is termed in other lives, and also in the Annals of the Four Masters (ad an. 801), Inbher Dea. The name therefore, the first syllable of which Adamnan translates Nigra, was ‘Lochdea’; and in the title to B. i. c. 28, Adamnan has the same name in his Stagnum ‘Lochdiæ,’ which he places in the Pictish province. It is now corrupted into Lochy, in which the obsolete word Loch, black, is preserved.