gaelic pronunciation

[O'Callaghan]

Tuatha is pronounced as TOO-A-HA. It's the same for both Irish and Scottish Gaelic. It can mean 'people', 'tribe', or 'group'. In the case of the Tuatha Dé Danann, it means 'people of the goddess Danu.' The 'th' sound (as pronounced in English) doesn't occur in the Goidelic language family. It does occur in the Brythonic Celtic languages, such as Welsh where it is represented by 'dd' or 'th'.

Like for example, I have an old friend called Gwyneth, who is not from the county of Gwynedd (in fact she's not even from Wales), but they are pronounced the same. From what I can remember, I think Welsh used the letter 'eth' (can't work out how to type it) at one time, like English once did for the soft 'th', but doesn't have the hard 'th' of the old letter 'thorn', or at least never used that letter anyway. The letter 'eth' looked a bit like a 'd', only different, which would explain why they represent it now as 'dd'. I didn't know that Gaelic doesn't have these sounds.

Nor did I know about Danu. I also mistook De for of/from like it is in a gazillion other languages, but if I thought about it I knew Irish had a genitive case because of Eirann (spelling?), hence De must be goddess (same root as deity I assume) and Danann must be genitive for Danu, right? So what does Fir Bolg (or even Firbolg as I've also seen it) translate to, or is that even gaelic?