Trevor Joyce has a poem called “The Turlough,” part of his 1995 collection stone floods (reprinted in With the First Dream of Fire They Hunt the Cold — see this post), that starts:
It is raining elsewhere
Vertical rivers reverse
stone floods
the karst domain
each sink turns source
and ends:
There is thunder now elsewhere
Under an incandescent sky
flash floods
spread out this lake
is on no map
The end note begins:
The turloughs or winter lakes of western Ireland occur in areas of karstic limestone. Rain falling on this land drains away through swallow-holes or sinks, but precipitation anywhere within the watershed may cause the water table to rise again above the valley floor, whereupon streams issue through the crevices by which they had previously drained away.
Of course I was curious about the word, so I turned to the OED (entry from 1915), which in lieu of a definition says “(See quots.)”:
1686 As to those places we call Turloughs, quasi Terreni lacus, or land-lakes; they answer the name very well, being lakes one part of the year of considerable depth; and very smooth fields the rest.
Philosophical Transactions 1685 (Royal Society) vol. 15 9581861 Serving..as water-courses for the ‘buried’ rivers which give rise to the sink-holes and turloughs for which the district of the Burren is famous.
Zoologist vol. 19 76171878 When the water during floods rises in the [shallow hollows], it overflows the adjoining lands, forming the turloughs, which are usually lakes in winter and callows in summer.
G. H. Kinahan, Manual of Geology of Ireland xix. 325
The etymology is:
< Irish, Gaelic turloch a brook, ground covered with water in winter and dry in summer, < tur whole, absolute, entire + loch lake, pool.
And the pronunciation:
British English /ˈtʊəlɒx/ TOOR-lokh /ˈtəːləʊ/ TUR-loh
U.S. English /ˈtərˌlɑx/ TUR-lahkh
Irish English /ˈtuːrlɑx/
But! Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran: Labyrinth (New York Review of Books, 2009), says on p. 125:
The genitive form in this toponym, Róidín an Turlaigh, shows that the final syllable of turlach is not, as the OED states and as the anglicization “turlough” implies, the word loch (genitive locha), a lake or lough, but is in fact a mere postfix of place: thus turlach, from tur, dry, could be explicated as “a place that dries up.”
Anybody know if this is to be taken seriously?
Lots of interesting stuff here (although believe at your own risk, I guess): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turlough_(lake) Note the allegedly similar thingies w/ different names in Quebec and Slovenia and the Irish word slugaire for the specific place where the water either drains out or gushes up.
FWIW I say /ˈt̪ərˌləx/ not /ˈtuːrlɑx/. See dictionary turlach pronunciations [C]onnacht [M]unster and [U]lster.
Turlough is also an anglicisation of the male name Toirdhealbhach.* Here’s Ronnie Drew saying the name “Turlough O’Carolan”
*which is simplified Traolach, which is equated with Terence.
[deleted and readded – IPA went funny on edit?]
I only know the word from school Geography class; I’m not aware of any actual turloughs in my locality.
That’s all fake. Sometimes the software here pretends that special characters are miscoded, but they never are.
Apparently there is discussion of turloch in
“Some Irish topographical terms” Irish Geography (1948) vol 1 no 5
available directly to subscribers and via Taylor and Francis.
The Burren (or rather its pubs) is more famous to tourists for its musical life — of the diddle-aidle variety. Also well-kept Guinness. Also superb oysters.
Hmph. The whole of County Clare is famous for trad, and Galway Bay for oysters. Average Guinness quality declines somewhat with distance from St James’s Gate brewery, but connoisseurs will tell you variation is mostly between individual pubs.
@mollymooly — thanks for the Ronnie Drew video! It’s interesting history (and also nice music :P)
The way he says the name sounds like “Turlock” to me, and made me think of the city by that name in California. Indeed, Wikipedia’s best guess is that the California town is named after an Irish town called Turlough, which gets its name from exactly the geographical feature this post is about!
Hmm, I would be sceptical if it was my Gaelic, but I have no right to be sceptical about Irish if mollymooly is happy!
Thoughts regardless:
1) ‘Entire loch’ seem a very odd name for a body of water whose whole point is that it’s temporary. However, I think the OED may have misread Macbain, who just says (search for ‘<turloch>’) ‘Ir. [turloch]; from [tur] and [loch].’
Search for <tur> and you get ‘entirely’, but the ‘tur’ intended might be the one hiding under <turadh>, dry weather, as suggested in JWB’s wikipedia link.
So less sceptical, but Irish dictionaries still suggest that ‘tur’ is mainly used for dry bread and dry humour (https://www.teanglann.ie/en/fgb/tur) rather than ordinary meteorological dryness, which is ‘tirim’.
2) Adjective-first would be unusual, although it does happen. On the other hand, naming places for something they *do* has the right feel to it, but I can’t currently produce examples.
3) Scottish placenames including ‘balloch’ are generally ‘bealach’, a pass, rather than anything to do with a loch, so there’s precedent for lochs slipping in to English names. (Balloch on Loch Lomond *might* be Baile an Loch, there’s a lot of loch there and not much bealach (the main pass is along at an tairbeart, discussed recently))
(It has never occurred to me before to wonder if a bealach is a place that’s mouth-ish…)
No online access, and the university library (next door to my work) doesn’t seem to have that issue. I can go to the NLS if anyone cares enough!
Sometimes the software here pretends that special characters are miscoded, but they never are.
The few times I’ve copied an IPA string from some website into an edit box here and then posted it, the string initially rendered as the original does. After modifying my post, or (I think) just F5-ing the page, suddenly the IPA is rendered as gibberish. So I don’t copy and paste special character stuff anymore.
But Xerib and others get away with it, so what the hey ? Is there a codeword for the cognoscenti, like an initial BOM ?
Happens to me a lot, but the gibberish resolves when I refresh the page. (The unintended gibberish, that is to say.)
One of the more learned Hatters actually explained the phenomenon a while back, but I’ve forgotten what they said.
That is so 90s web page. The deeper reason for these problems may just be that the I in IPA is not me. I sorta knew that already. I also don’t care about Insta.
Search for and you get ‘entirely’, but the ‘tur’ intended might be the one hiding under , dry weather, as suggested in JWB’s wikipedia link.
Aha, I’ll bet you’re right. Contact the OED!
Of course, since 1915 they may have figured that out…
I thought of O’Carolan when I saw the header.
Irish Geography (1948) vol 1 no 5 p 154 from Google Books snippet view:
turlach, m. (gs. & npl. -aigh, gpl. ~) does contrast with e.g. méarloch, m. (gs. ~a, pl. ~anna) which has the same declension as loch; but maybe that’s a folk etymological change?
eDIL also says “tur + loch” but has cites matching the modern declension
Or maybe it’s the declension of loch that has changed?
Aha, interesting!
The genitive form in this toponym, Róidín an Turlaigh, shows that the final syllable of turlach is not, as the OED states and as the anglicization “turlough” implies, the word loch (genitive locha), a lake or lough, but is in fact a mere postfix of place: thus turlach, from tur, dry, could be explicated as “a place that dries up.”
The early o-stem forms of turloch, turlach (that is, the early forms preserved in Middle Irish sources) seems to me to be no great obstacle to etymological analysis of turloch as tur ‘dry’ + loch ‘lake’. Thurneysen has a discussion of the early confusion of the u- and o- declensions, § 309, p. 196 here.
(The Old Irish loch is a u-stem, genitive locha. This matches Latin lacus, gen. lacūs; Old Norse lǫgr, gen. lagar ‘sea, water’, Old English lagu; Old Church Slavonic *loky ‘puddle, pool, ὄμβρημα’, genitive apparently lokъvi in the Euchologium Sinaiticum, if the old edition is to be trusted, Bulgarian локва ‘puddle’, etc.; possibly Greek λάκκος ‘pond, cistern’, if from *lakw-os (cf. dialectal ἴϰϰος ‘horse’ beside ἳππος). Note the westerly distribution of this item among the branches of Indo-European and the problematic correspondence of vowel of the first syllable in Latin and Greek and the vowel in the other languages. Ultimately a loanword at some early stage?)
For the formation with the adjective tur as the first member, also note under tur ‘dry’ in the DIL:
Turloch rhymes with muirloch, murloch ‘lagoon, salt-marsh’, which is listed (with a rather early attestation from the Southampton Psalter) among the compounds of muir ‘sea’ in the eDIL. There are no early cites diagnostic of the declension there, but Modern Irish murlach is like turlach. ‘Sea-lake’ for ‘lagoon’ (Venetian laguna, Latin lacūna ‘pool, pond’, from lacus!) makes good sense.
For his part, Tim Robinson seems to be channeling P.W. Joyce (1875), p. 449 here (the cross-reference there goes here). Joyce was working without the benefit of the Dictionary of the Irish Language and critical editions of the older Irish texts.
Thanks, that’s very helpful.