The Manapii () are an ancient tribe from southeastern

Ireland Ireland (, ; ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe. Geopolitically, the island is divided between the Republic of Ireland (officially Names of the Irish state, named Irelan ...

mentioned by Greek geographer

Ptolemy Claudius Ptolemy (; , ; ; – 160s/170s AD) was a Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were important to later Byzantine science, Byzant ...

in the 2nd century AD. They were later attested as '' (Fir) Manach'' (var. ''Manaig'', ''Monaig'') in the Early Christian period, a tribe dwelling further north in

County Down County Down () is one of the six counties of Northern Ireland, one of the nine counties of Ulster and one of the traditional thirty-two counties of Ireland. It covers an area of and has a population of 552,261. It borders County Antrim to the ...

and near

Lough Erne Lough Erne ( , ) is the name of two connected lakes in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. It is the second-biggest lake system in Northern Ireland and Ulster, and the fourth biggest in Ireland. The lakes are widened sections of the River E ...

which gave its name to the modern

County Fermanagh County Fermanagh ( ; ) is one of the thirty-two counties of Ireland, one of the nine counties of Ulster and one of six counties of Northern Ireland. The county covers an area of and had a population of 63,585 as of 2021. Enniskillen is the ...

. Early Irish genealogists mentioned that the Manaig had emigrated from the south of

Leinster Leinster ( ; or ) is one of the four provinces of Ireland, in the southeast of Ireland. The modern province comprises the ancient Kingdoms of Meath, Leinster and Osraige, which existed during Gaelic Ireland. Following the 12th-century ...

Name

The

ethnonym An ethnonym () is a name applied to a given ethnic group. Ethnonyms can be divided into two categories: exonyms (whose name of the ethnic group has been created by another group of people) and autonyms, or endonyms (whose name is created and used ...

''Manapii'' has been

phonetically Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

compared with the

Gaulish Gaulish is an extinct Celtic languages, Celtic language spoken in parts of Continental Europe before and during the period of the Roman Empire. In the narrow sense, Gaulish was the language of the Celts of Gaul (now France, Luxembourg, Belgium, ...

Menapii The Menapii were a Belgic tribe dwelling near the North Sea, around present-day Cassel, during the Iron Age and the Roman period. History The Menapii were persistent opponents of Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul, resisting until 54 BC. They ...

'', a tribe from northern Gaul first recorded in the 1st century BC. Those names may ultimately derive from a

Proto-Celtic Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic, is the hypothetical ancestral proto-language of all known Celtic languages, and a descendant of Proto-Indo-European. It is not attested in writing but has been partly Linguistic reconstruction, reconstructed throu ...

form reconstructed as *''Menak^wī'' or *''Manak^wī''., s.v. ''Menapii''. The etymology is uncertain. It could mean the 'mountain people' or the 'high-living people', from the root *''mon''- ('mountain', cf. MWelsh ''mynydd'', OBret. ''monid''), or else derive from the root *''men''- ('think, remember'; cf. OIr. ''muinithir'' 'think', Welsh ''mynnu'' 'wish').Isaac, Graham, "Place-Names in Ptolemy's Geography : An Electronic Data Base with Etymological Analysis of Celtic Name Elements". CD-ROM. 2004, CMCS Publications, Aberystwyth. According to scholar Patrick Sims-Williams, the name ''Manapii'' may have been imported by settlers from Britain, for it shows a

P-Celtic The Gallo-Brittonic languages, also known as the P-Celtic languages, are a proposed subdivision of the Celtic languages containing the languages of Ancient Gaul (both ''Gallia Celtica, Celtica'' and ''Belgica'') and Celtic Britain, which share ce ...

form that possibly came to be assimilated in the local Irish dialect as *''Manak^wī'' > ''Manaig''.

References

Bibliography

* * * Prehistoric Ireland Tribes of ancient Ireland {{Ireland-hist-stub