help with Irish name pronunciation

[Jerry]

Greets,
We have a semi-new person in our shire who is working on a name and she is
needing help with Irish pronunciation. Any help would be appreciated.

The names are:

O'Loingsigh,

Loingseach,

O'Loingseachain,

Longseareach.

Thanks
Ld. Tristan
Bois d'Arc
Calontir

[hrj...@socrates.berkeley.edu]

Jerry <jrmape...@ckt.net> wrote:
: Greets,

: We have a semi-new person in our shire who is working on a name and she is
: needing help with Irish pronunciation. Any help would be appreciated.

The easiest way to get a first-aproximation of pronunciation for Gaelic
names is to find a book on the topic that gives both Gaelic and Anglicized
written forms. Since the latter are, in essence, "what the Gaelic
pronunciation looks like when written in English", it works fairly
reliably. This method misses some nuances of pronunciation that simply
don't exist in English, and so can't be represented in English spelling,
and it may be misleading in that you need to know what _period_
pronunciation the spelling represents in English.

Using Patrick Woulfe's "Irish Names and Surnames" (which conveniently
alphabetizes listings by Gaelic spelling -- if you're going the other
direction, a source like Edward MacLysaght's "Surnames of Ireland" is a
better first step):

: The names are:

: O'Loingsigh,

Some Anglicized forms from ca. 1600 are "O Lynchy", "O Lynche", "O
Lensie", which should get you a good triangulation.

: Loingseach,

The is the masculine given name from which the previous surname is
derived. That is, "o/ Loingsigh" means "male descendent of Loingseach".
It is pronounced, roughly, "LINN-shekh" where "kh" stands for the "hard
ch" of Scottish "loch" or German "Bach".

: O'Loingseachain,

Woulfe gives one ca. 1600 Anglicized form: "O Lynseghane". Here the
"gh" is an attempt to render that "hard ch" sound described above. The
root name here is "Loingseacha/n" pronounced "LINN-shekh-ahn", and the
surname means "male descendent of Loingseacha/n".

: Longseareach.

I can't find any reference to a Gaelic name that would look like this (in
fact, there are aspects of the spelling here that suggest that if there is
a Gaelic name underlying this, it may have been mangled a bit in
transmission). Without being confident that it's actually a Gaelic word,
I'm not sure how useful it would be to attempt to provide a Gaelic
pronunciation.

Since you indicate that the interested person is female, she should know
that a woman would use a slightly different form of the surnames,
substituting "inghean ui" for "o". The name "Loingseach" isn't a surname,
and as a given name is masculine, so it wouldn't be applicable either.

Tangwystyl

--
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Heather Rose Jones hrj...@socrates.berkeley.edu
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