Origin of The Surnames Abbott & McNab
With Relevant Hebrew & Arabic Word Lore
Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth’s marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
—Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 1988
The surname Abbott is of course from the word abbot, the head of a monastery or convent. Abbots were priests and were celibate, so they could not found families. And even if they did enjoy a quick tryst under the table in a moonlit refectory with a scullery wench, it would have been unwise to make known the fact by labeling one’s bastard spawn in public registries.
Therefore Abbot as a surname usually meant that the founding ancestor of the family had been the lay servant of an abbot or a male who worked on the estate or in the household of an abbot. Surprisingly then, the Scottish Gaelic surname MacNab does mean ‘son of the abbot.’
Concerning the etymology of MacNab, two questions arise.
First query: How did that n get in front of the ‘ab’ in MacNab? That’s because the Gaelic form of the name was mac an aba ‘son of the abbot.’
Second query: How could celibate abbots have offspring and thus found families? Unlike most other Catholic abbacies, those held by Celtic abbots were lay positions and the office was hereditary. In Glendochart, the MacNab homeland in Perthshire, Scotland, stood a great monastery built in the early Middle Ages where the first chiefs of the clan were lay abbots. Some Scottish families with the name Abbott are actually disgruntled MacNabs who, at several points in the long, troubled history of the clan, grew so angry at clan leaders that they changed their names, and translated MacNab back into English as Abbott!
Etymology of Abbot
The word abbot entered English from ecclesiastical Latin abbas, itself from Koine Greek abbas, borrowed directly from Biblical Hebrew abba ‘father, abbot.’ And compare Aramaic abbá ‘father.’ In modern Hebrew abba with the first syllable stressed means ‘father, daddy, papa, and abbot.’ The ancient Hebrew root ab could refer to God the Father and begins many Hebrew personal names:
Abigail ‘father of exaltation’
Abner ‘father of light’
Abraham ‘father of many’ (?)
In Genesis 17:5 the derivation of the name Abraham is given as the Hebrew phrase av hamon (goyim) ‘father of a multitude of nations.’ But, like very many derivations given in the Old Testament, it is not supported by the rules of Semitic linguistic change and is utter folk etymology, based on preposterous sound similarities and all the other spurious byways of ancient “let’s-guess” etymology. The true origin of the name Abraham is uncertain.
Each Old Testament derivational error however was sanctioned by obdurate rabbinical certainty and thus error after etymological error has flowed down through the ages. After the middle of the 20th century, that is, at the dawn of modern comparative Semitic etymology, many of these ancient bad guesses were stripped at last of canonical certitude and dumped into the midden of linguistic history where they so richly deserve to molder.
Absalom ‘father of peace’
Compare shalom in Hebrew and salaam in Arabic, the beautiful greeting of peace common to both these members of the Semitic language family. Salaam and shalom bring us to a little digression about Semitic languages, and about Hebrew and Arabic first and last names.
Triliteral Semitic Roots
The verbal roots in Hebrew and Arabic are said to be triliteral. Most of them are based on three consonants. And salaam is an example worth discussing because it gives us two words widely used in English. The Arabic triliteral root s-l-m, expressed usually as the verbal form salima or salama has a basic meaning of ‘be safe and sound’ and developed meanings like ‘be at peace’ and ‘be in the peace of Allah’ and hence ‘give in or submit to the will of Allah.’ If we take the s-l-m root, prefix an i and perform a few other abstract-noun-forming transformations, we get the noun islam ‘submission or surrender,’ which becomes the name of a religion, Islam ‘submission to the will of Allah.’ One who has submitted to the will of Allah is a muslim, where the passive, preterite noun-forming prefix mu- is added to the s-l-m root. Muslim thus has a literal meaning of ‘one who has submitted to the will of Allah.’
Salim
Next, consider the beautiful given name borne by many male muslims the world over, Salim. This means ‘safe and sound’ or ‘healthy’ when stressed on the last syllable. When Salim is stressed on the first syllable it means ‘free, secure.’ An even older, pre-Islamic Arabic female name is Salma, based on the same s-l-m root. Salma is Salima, a female version of Salim, with the stress on the first syllable so strongly pronounced that the second syllable, a short i to begin with, gradually drops out. Try saying the name Salima and punching the first syllable very strongly, and you will hear the weak i-sound begin to disappear. This is precisely what happened in spoken Arabic over the course of many years.
Salma as an English Given Name
Salma follows a strange path indeed into English. An eighteenth-century Scottish poet and translator named James Macpherson (1736–96) published what he claimed were the works of a long-lost Gaelic poet named Ossian. The book of translations was phenomenally popular all over England and Europe. Macpherson was later revealed to have perpetrated a vast hoax on the reading public. He had made up the poems from bits and pieces of Gaelic folklore. But that did nothing to stem the sweeping tide of Ossian mania. People began naming their children after characters in the poems. Macpherson had named Ossian’s castle: Selma . It seems Macpherson must have come across some book featuring Arabic names like Salma. In Germany and Scandinavia there was a sudden vogue to name female babies Selma. Although never thereafter widely popular, the name is still found in the West, for example, in the name of American comedy writer, Selma Diamond.
Hebrew Reflex is SH-L-M
The Hebrew reflex of the triliteral root s-l-m changes the s to sh sometimes, so that the root is sh-l-m, to give nouns like shalom ‘peace.’ Peacefulness is shulamit in Hebrew.
Bin & Bint
A terminal t is a common marker of grammatical and sexual femininity in Semitic languages. For example, in Classical Arabic: bin is ‘son,’ bint is ‘daughter’ or ‘girl.’ Bint was borrowed into English from British infantry slang used by soldiers posted to various Middle Eastern countries in the middle of the nineteenth century, where it was used as an insulting term for any Arab woman. Bin commonly appears as a patronymic prefix in hundreds of Arabic surnames, including the notorious bin Laden. In Arabic surnames its sense is ‘descendant of...’ Hebrew uses bin’s cognate equivalent in Jewish surnames, e.g. ben Gurion.
Shulamit is a familiar female name today in modern Israel. It is also seen as Shelomit, Shulamite, and Shulamith or contracted to Shula. Jews in the West sometimes change it to Sheila.
An Unveiled Reference to Salome
Perhaps the most infamous name derived from the shalom root is Salome, a late Greek version of the Aramaic Shalamzu, itself an abbreviation of Aramaic Shalomziyon ‘peace of Zion.’
Sinuous and lissome, Salome danced for King Herod and stirred regal concupiscence with the arousing whisper of gauze veils and the airy kiss of silk drawn slowly over nude skin. So jolted was the royal undercarriage that Herod offered Salome anything she desired. She wanted the severed head of John the Baptist brought to her on a plate. This scene imprinted itself on the medieval Christian imagination so firmly that Salome became a taboo name for girls until almost the twentieth century, and even today it wins no popularity contests.
From the sh-l-m root as well is Shlomo, a modern Hebrew form of Solomon (Hebrew Shelomoh ‘peaceful’). The Arabic form of Solomon is Sulayman, best known to Western history in the name of that mighty sultan of the Ottoman empire, Suleiman the Magnificent (1496–1566). One Yiddish form of Solomon is Zalman, whose pet form Zal is common. Fans of 1960s mellow pop music will remember Canadian Zal Yanovsky, lead guitarist for the Lovin’ Spoonful whose hits included “Do You Believe in Magic?” and “Day Dream.”
Thus we see how one Semitic trilateral root, s-l-m, can wing its way across time, through the centuries, borne by a multitude of Hebrew and Arabic names, and how, from those languages of the Middle East, principally by means of holy books such as the Bible and the Koran, the s-l-m names have spread over the earth into many tongues.
© 2007 William gordon Casselman
