in the south-west of the county of Kerry; and the O'Connells, of that of Magunihy, in the south-east of the same.[1] Add to this that Corc Duibne was supposed to have left descendants of his settled near Kinsale,[2] in the county of Cork, and one may infer that most of the ancient inhabitants of Kerry and a good deal more considered themselves descended from Duben. However, the survival of the name Corco Duibne as Corcaguinny,[3] allows us to infer that the traditional descent from an ancestress Duben continued more vigorously accredited on the Dingle peninsula than anywhere else, and it so happens that this can be corroborated in a remarkable manner; for the barony of Corcaguinny is richer in Ogam inscriptions probably than any other Irish district of the same area. Two of them are of special interest to us here, as they seem to refer to the mythic ancestress. For if you put Duben, genitive Duibne, back into the form which the name should, according to analogy, have had in early Irish, you will have some such a name as Dubina or Dobina, genitive Dubinïas or Dobinïas: this is exact enough to enable you at once to recognize the name in its attested forms in Ogam. One of the stones
- ↑ Ibid.; also p. 76, and the same scholar's notes to the Four Masters, A.D. 1095 (Vol. ij. 950), 1495 (Vol. iv. 1220), 1581 (Vol. v. 1756); also his edition of the old Topographical Poems (Dublin, 1862), pp. 108-9, and notes 594-9.
- ↑ The Bk. of Fenagh, note by the editor, 32.
- ↑ The change of sound is not a very unusual one: Corco Duibne was softened down to Corco Dhuine; but the spirant sound which analogy would indicate the dh to have once had, has long since been generally superseded by that of gh. The pronunciation represented by the spelling Corcaguinny was evolved in consequence of a tendency, discernible here and there, to reduce the spirant gh into a corresponding mute g.
