How to pronounce a townland in Mayo

KCMike,

Three syllables -  Derrin - Daff - Derg.

Regards,

KCMike,

I lived in that area for 3 years in the mid 1960's. The local people pronounced it - Dereen daff Derg which is close to the Gaelic.

See attached from Logainm.ie

Regard,

If you go to the logainm.ie site itself  [https://www.logainm.ie/en] and put the townland name [Doire an Daimh Dheirg] into the search field, it will take you to the page for that name at logainm.ie, where you can hear the name being pronounced in its Irish form by clicking on the arrow which is to the right of the purple bold-faced form of the name near the top (below the map).  Non-Irish speakers sometimes have trouble hearing sounds in Irish, so in case it helps, what you're hearing is roughly as follows:

"DERR unn da[ff] YERR-ig"

I've put the "ff" in brackets, because it would have gotten swallowed in fast speech, as you can hear (although you'd hear it if the word damh/daimh were pronounced all by itself).  The final word, dheirg [a genitive form of dearg, meaning "red"] looks as though it should have one syllable, but in Irish it actually has two syllables, with an extra vowel sound that isn't indicated in writing (thus:  "YERR-ig").  Non-Irish speakers may pronounce it as one syllable, however, so since most people in the area are now English-speaking, McCoy may be right about how the anglicized form is pronounced nowadays (including the "ff").  I've never heard it pronounced myself, but it does sound like a bit of a tongue-twister to me.  I've been to where my grandparents grew up about 10 miles to the north, and the Irish-language pronunciations are still pretty common there, even when the anglicized written forms are used.

Logainm.ie doesn't give the full meaning of the name, possibly because it is not certain, but it may mean "thicket of the red ox".

Kevin

Thanks for your help. I looked on some old maps that refer to Derrindaffderg as "oak wood of the red ox."

Mike

Glad to help.  What you found as the meaning makes sense, since doire can mean either a single oak tree or a grove/wood/thicket of oaks.  I went with thicket only because that's what logainm.ie said.  I surmise that they didn't translate damh/daimh at logainm.ie only because it can actually have several meanings and they weren't sure what the original meaning was, but "ox" makes the most sense in context.