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The Salmon of Wisdom (Life Sciences)
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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Nicholas Crane, ambling around Ireland in the footsteps of Camden, was delighted to discover the source of the Shannon, Ireland's main river and apparently good for salmon fishing; it was a rather spectacular source compared to the puny dribbles of some major rivers.

Shannon is Sionna in Celtic or Senua:
Senua:
In ancient Celtic polytheism, the female deification of the outpouring wellspring
Well, the waterfall could be described as an outpouring.

Senua was probably an older Celtic goddess, worshipped at a spring on the site, who was then adopted and Romanised - twinned with their goddess Minerva - by the invaders.. ...Etymological evidence suggests this goddess may be a Brythonic form of Shannon.


Online Etymology says some scholars think salmon has a Celtic etymology. It's all a bit vague and words like Proto-Celtic (?) crop up..

Senua is derived from the Proto-Celtic *Send(o)wā meaning 'the one that pours out' (q.v. [1] [2] [3]), from which root the theonym and hydronym Shannon is also derived. Proto-Celtic, also called Common Celtic, is the putative ancestor of all the known Celtic languages. ...


The Roman version of Senua is said to be Minerva, goddess of war and wisdom, art and science.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Hatty wrote:

Senua is derived from the Proto-Celtic *Send(o)wā meaning 'the one that pours out' (q.v. [1] [2] [3]), from which root the theonym and hydronym Shannon is also derived. Proto-Celtic, also called Common Celtic, is the putative ancestor of all the known Celtic languages. ...



Hmm...

That really looks an awful lot like Shenandoah. And then when we consider that both the Shenandoah and Shannon are rivers, drawing a connection becomes very tempting. And what sort of connection? Well, because Shenandoah has at least one etymology connecting it with the idea of "daughter" (supposedly a native American word meaning "daughter of the stars", though no one seems to know the specific native language in which it means this) and also has an old, explicit association with the word "daughter", in a Sea Shanty called "Oh Shenandoah" I feel fairly confident we can guess.

I will bet that the scholarly etymology of Send(o)wā and Shannon is reversed and that Send(o)wā and Shenandoah both mean "Daughter of the Shannon".

"Doah" would be just a phonetic rendering of some older form of the English word "Daughter".

(And I'll also bet that Doah is associated somehow with "Doe", because another imagined Native American origin for the word is "Deer of the woods".)
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