“I may instance _Rice_ or _Rees_ (written in Greek Ρησα――see Luke,
iii. 27), Davis, Jones, Lewis, &c., which are names greatly abounding in
Wales, and only later corruptions, as I apprehend, of Jewish patronymics.
The final _s_ is, I believe, admitted to be, in _most_ proper names,
not the sign of the plural number, but of the genitive case, and is one
way of signifying the son of the person, and thus we have David’s-son,
David’s, Davis;――Jonah’s-son, Jonah’s, Jones;――Levis’-son, Levis’, or
Lewis.
“Levi, by the writers of the New Testament, is written Λευϊ, and also
Λευις, which is the identical Levvis of the Welch, and possibly a
corruption of the Greek genitive for the nominative, by a similar
process with the above, and perhaps also Ιωνας. The other Welch form of
denoting a man’s son――viz., by the word _ap_, as Davis-ap-Rees, or Rice,
whence it slides into the word itself, and from ap-Rice becomes _Price_,
is probably Hebrew also; since the sacred historian tells us that Ab-ner
is son of Ner. _Ab_ indeed signifies _father_ rather than son, and it
would appear, from many of their names, that they were in the habit of
recognizing a man by the person whom he had for his father; but it comes
practically to the same thing as if it literally meant son: for we can
scarcely avoid saying of him of whom we would speak as having Ner for
his father, he is Ner’s son.”――_Abdiel_ in the Jewish Expositor, 1828,
pp. 126, 127.