More thinking on the Coughlin Name and Origins

My family knows that our Coughlin ancestors came from County Cork, Ireland. But, alas, County Cork is the largest county in the country. So where in County Cork are they from? Linguistic evidence indicates that they probably come from West Cork. The name is commonly pronounced something like /COCK-lin/ in the west of the county and something like /COWL-in/ in the east and around Cork City. Also, the name Coughlin has many variants (among these are Coghlin, Coghlan, Coughlan, Cocklin--and sometimes Conklin, Conkling, Cohalan, etc.). In Irish-Gaelic, the name is written Ó Cochláin. I have read that the name is often assosciated with certain baronies in West Cork: Carberry, for example.

Our last name has appeared in many astonishingly different spellings over time (and in official documents)! My cousin Jack Pendergast has said that in some census records the name is listed as "Couthin," or something like that. Other times is is spelled "Conkling" on census forms. The first naturalization papers show "Coghlin," and on a grave marker in Old St. Bernard's Cemetery, Scipio, Cayuga County, New York, I believe it's also spelled "Coghlin." This makes me think that name spellings were more fluid, dynamic, and perhaps less important in the mid 1800's than now. Also, we know that Daniel and Mary Coghlin/Coughlin were unable to read and write, so someone else was transcribing a spoken name. And we know that the Irish pronunciation of Coghlin/Coughlin has a mid consonant sound that is not easily transcribed into English. The sound is somewhere between a breathy /k/ and the/x/ sound found in German (Nacht), in Scottish (loch), and perhaps in Greek (the initial sound of "Christ" as it is spoken in Greek). Transcribers have heard this sound as a /k/, as a /g/, and even as a /t/ sound. They have also heard the vowel preceding this as nasalized, thus begetting Conklin. And sometimes the ending sound is perceived as an "engwa," yielding Conkling. These sound permutations are all quite familiar in the Munster dialects of Irish-Gaelic, spoken by our great great grandparents, Daniel and Mary Crowley Coghlin, and our great grandfather, Cornelius Coughlin.