Hi everyone just looking for help on my surname. I know Cotter is Mac Oitir, but I'm never sure on pronunciation. I've been told Mokwitcher (which sounds unnatural to my Ulster tongue) and MokAwchur. Do any Cotters have any input? Any Donegal men? I'm looking for a few different opinions if you have them. Thanks.

The name Cotter is derived from the Irish name Mac Oitir that in turn is derived from a Norse first name meanin bank - as in sandbank or riverbank. The sept was located in south County Cork where the town of Ballymacotter shows their homeland. I would pronounce the name as Mok-witcher.

Question, has the -t- in Oitir been lenited? It seems odd if it hasn't.

If not, the -t- in Munster Irish (Cork), is pronounced as a -t-; its not pronounced as -tch- cluster!

Don't know how acurate this is: http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/McCotter

Cian

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Please wait for corrections/ more input from other forum members before acting on advice

I'm not qualified to add to the comments on pronunciation, but thought I would pass on that, according to MacLysaght’s Surnames of Ireland, the surname was originally Mac Oitir, but developed into Mac Coitir (no lenition in either case).

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

Does it? I thought significant borrowing from Old Norse only occurred after lenition ceased to be a productive process in Irish and was fully grammaticalised (ca. 7th cent. CE, IIRC).

Oi is especially tricky in Irish. Depending on the word, it can become /o/, /oː/, /i/, /iː/, or /e/--and that's just in stressed position. (I don't recall any examples of /eː/, but there's a lot about Irish dialects I don't know.) Given the anglicisations seem to pretty consistently favour "o", my guess would be [ˈmˠɑkˈɔtʲɪɾʲ]. But really you'd need to ask fluent speakers and they might each tell you something different.

Question, has the -t- in Oitir been lenited? It seems odd if it hasn't. [/quote]

I don't really get you, do you think it should be like Mac Otter (phonetically speaking)? I'm wondering if thats dialectal, how would you say a word like Tír? Tear or cheer?



Given the anglicisations seem to pretty consistently favour "o", my guess would be [ˈmˠɑkˈɔtʲɪɾʲ].

If I've read that correctly it would be similar to how I've been saying it, Aw-chur. Thanks for all the responses, I'm always interested in how the names develop.

Lenition (séimhiú) is a process under which the pronunciation of the consonant is softened so that it loses its usual consonantal value, i.e. 'sound'.

Orthographically, in modern times, lenition is shown by the inclusion of a -h-, i.e. -th- is a lenited -t-.

Listen to the lenited inner -t- in tuismitheoir : http://www.teanglann.ie/en/fuaim/tuismitheoir

Usually at the end of the Middle Irish period and during the Early-Modern and Modern Irish period, when a consonant stands in between two vowels that consonant becomes lenited , e.g. O.Ir. saegal > saoghal > saol.

Lemition is especially common in words where a consonant is flanked between two slender vowels, i.e. -i-, -e-.

That's why, I find it odd that Mac Oitir, didn't become Oithir, which would change its pronunciation to something like /u'hir'/ in modern Irish.

Of course like everything in language there are exceptions, e.g. idir 'between', tógáil 'building, raising' etc... . However, Irish usually has exceptions to the exceptions

So, I hope that makes more sense.

Seeing that the -t- in Oitir is not lenited - and seeing that the name is originally from Cork (Munster) - I was giving the Munster pronunciation of slender -t-, i.e. a -t- that has a slender vowel (i, e) coming before or after it. What I was saying - or trying to say - is that Munster-Irish slender -t- /t'/ differs considerably from the Ulster pronunciation /cha/ or /j'/.

Listen to the pronunciation of teacht 'coming': http://www.teanglann.ie/en/fuaim/teacht



Hmm, did you read that somewhere?

What do you mean by productive process and grammaticalised exactly in this context?

Lenition of internal consonants (phonetic development) being flanked by two vowels occurs right through the Early-Modern, Modern Irish period; e.g. Old Ir. saegal > saoghal
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The difference in pronunciation is very clear in verbal nouns, where compensatory vowel lengthening occurs (e.g. ú) in many cases as a direct result of the loss of the consonant;

e.g.

oc marb(h)ad > ag marú

and lots of others e.g. O. Ir. oc ordugud > ordughadh > ordú.

Other late phonetic changes in lenited internal consonants:

canman > canmhain(t) > canúin(t)

dearmad > dearmad; Munster: dearmhad > dearúd (the fact that there is dialectal variability here, it would suggest that the Munster Irish form is a later development since dearmad is also the Old Irish form.

Cian

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Please wait for corrections/ more input from other forum members before acting on advice

I've read it multiple places. My recollection of the 7th century as the endpoint of the original process came from having read Ranko Matasovic's essay "Insular Celtic as a language area" in the book Celtic languages in contact a couple days ago, but I didn't have an opportunity to consult it before posting. I see that he doesn't give an exact date for the completion of the process but proposes that it took place "within the period of 350-550 CE". Kenneth Jackson, in Language and history in Early Britain dates lenition in Irish to "the second half of the 5th century", placing it before other changes in that period (such as vowel affection). So it turns out that was being extremely conservative in naming such a late endpoint. (For reference, the beginning of the "Viking Age" is dated to the 790s. The first recorded Viking raids in Ireland occurred in 795 CE.)


As a "productive process", I mean one that is applied across the board to all words in the language, native or borrowed. For instance, I would consider the change of [w] > [v] a productive process in contemporary German because there are no longer any native words with [w] in the language and foreign borrowings with [w] are pronounced with [v] by the majority of native speakers (though with the growth of bilingualism in English, an increasing number use [w], so this rule may cease to be productive in the near future).

From that point of view, lenition is clearly no longer productive in Irish. When Irish borrowed the English word motor in the 19th century, it did so in the form mótar. It did not become *móthar. So clearly sometime between then and when Latin cathedra was borrowed as cathaír (mod. cathaoir), the process stopped operating. (Jackson et al. examined a great deal of evidence of this sort in order to narrow down that date to the before the end of the 5th century CE.)

However, as a grammatical process, lenition is still active in contemporary Irish. The t in mótar may not ever be lenited, but the m is in instances where the grammar of Irish requires this, e.g. feithicil mhótair, den mhótar, mo mhótar. Originally, lenition was a phonetic process which, as you say, applied universally to single consonants in intervocalic position, whether word-internally or otherwise (just as the change to [v] affects all instances of /w/ in contemporary German, regardless of position or source). But eventually this phonetic change became grammaticalised into an initial mutation used to express one of a number of grammatical relationships between the word in question and the one(s) before it. As such, it applies analogically to words which entred the language even as much as a millennium-and-a-half since the the original period of lenition ended.


Nope; the orthography only makes it look that way. Old Irish saegal was actually pronounced */seɣəl/. In Old Irish, the ponc séimhithe was only used with the letters f and s (and even then not consistently). [Source: David Stifter, Sengoídelc, p. 20.]


That's late Old Irish at best. The usual Old Irish form is dermat. [See the entry in eDIL.] Note the use of t for a consonant already pronounced [d̪] in Old Irish! The spelling m is ambiguous here, since after liquids Old Irish m represented both /m/ (e.g. format, mod. formad) and /ṽ/ (e.g. formór, mod. formhór). So, in fact, the variation could be very old indeed.

BTW, I hope you enjoyed this digression for its own sake, since ultimately none of it matters in this case. The proximate source of the name is Old Norse Óttar. So we're not dealing with a single consonant anyway. (Indeed, the conventional Old Irish spelling of the name is Ottir.) So even if the name had been borrowed early enough to be lenited (which it wasn't, Ottir Dub only having come to Ireland in 914 CE), it still would've ended up with t and not th.

It's not a surname I'm familiar with.