Beal uisge

[chimera]

Mhaioneach bhainneach , gruthach, mhaoisleach, shlamanach , uanach , uachdarach , mhiosganach are good for you.
But A Bhealtuinn bailceach is not.
Who needs more rain after winter? " Bailc " may derive from ON balkr storm which is not from root *bal - "strong".
Possibly the Norse word came from raids on Roman shipping dating back to 170 AD from Chauci pirates of Emden-Hamburg region and Frank pirates who went as far as Spain. Syrians who followed Baal were sharp traders and had a colony on the Rhone river. Cargo went along the Seine river to Rhone and to Marseilles which had the god Baal Zaphon. He was a Baal of storms and the sea. Maybe he was feared by longboat crews but also linked with the benefits of wealth from raiding.
Is this likely?

[GunChleoc]

If it is indeed from Baal, I would wonder where the additional c at the end comes from in bailc.

[chimera]

From this distance (in Oz ) I noticed a pic of Norway with a solid bank of storm clouds.
Old English balca "ridge, bank," from or influenced by Old Norse balkr "ridge of land," especially between two plowed furrows, both from Proto-Germanic *balkon- (cognates: Old Saxon balko, Danish bjelke, Old Frisian balka, Old High German balcho, German Balken "beam, rafter"), .
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Somehow, Norse added -kr . Maybe *kwr " to form, create". It appears in " /sanskrit. cruithne /".
"Bhailceach , mhaioneach " have the sense "producing" which may double-up with "bailc" as " rain. formed. produced".
This gives a further idea of a deity and driving storms. Is that how the suffixes could act?

[chimera]

If ON balkr is a " furrow between 2 banks", then a plural may be formed, with root *bhelg or *bal. So bulkhead is usually meaning several in a boat, or beams / walls in a house. But "cloud-bank" is not really meaning "rainfall".
Old Norse.
Suffix -ar : plural , possessive.
Bhailceach "seasonal rain" could be plural rains, with -kar becoming -c . Don't know.

Just by chance, the webpage on Suffix -ar had this:
Ngarrindjeri

Suffix : -ar Suffix meaning many and used to denote a plural.

mimini (woman) - miminar (women).

And :

"In colloquial Persian, the plural suffix -hā (pronounced -ā after consonants) can be used with virtually all nouns, even if they take an ān-plural or an Arabic plural in the written standard language. For example, one can say mard-hā (or mard-ā) instead of standard mardān ("men"). "
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This is the point of what I'm trying to prove, that Sanskrit-Persian influence reached Australia. Indonesia has about 50% Sanskritic vocabulary.
"Ringbalin" is a ceremony of Ngarrindjeri people of South Australia, walking along the central Oz river in the steps of the warrior hero who brought waters down the river.
( Gaelic ) Rainig am bailceach = ringbalin.
Sanskrit ring : moving slowly. balin : warrior.
Balinese ring : with. Balin : son of Indra, warrior king.
Balin = Baal so it would be handy to pin that down. Not easy.

[chimera]

Sanskrit root: balh , बल्ह : to be pre-eminent ,

Skr बलिन् balin m. : soldier
Hebrew בעל (Ba‘al, "Baal", and ba‘al, "lord, husband"), from Proto-Semitic *baʿl- ‎(“owner, lord, husband”).

Again, "strong : storm" may or may not be linked.
"Pre-eminent : soldier : lord" may or may not be linked. Persians and Syrian- Babylonians were merging some traditions and language. The waters are muddied.

[chimera]

So, now.
In Portugal, the .um. port of Balsa may be named from Baal Saphon, god of storms. There is a shrine on the mountain top to Zephyr the storm wind, like Baal of storms. Sailors are guided by the lighthouse there built by Rome.
Portuguese "balsa" means a river-raft or river-boat. Also a pool of water, or calm pool of olive oil.
From there Phoenician ships went to Britain across the stormy Biscay.
Baal defeated Yamm god who resembled the Greek Poseidon-Neptune sea power. And many navies today have the Neptune ceremony at the Equator. So Baal may have gone along the French rivers to the Channel or around Spain to Cornwall.

[chimera]

German scholar H. Petersmann has proposed a rather different interpretation of the theology of Neptune.[52] Developing his understanding of the theonym as rooted in IE *nebh, he argues that the god would be an ancient deity of the cloudy and rainy sky in company with and in opposition to Zeus/Jupiter, god of the clear bright sky. Similar to Caelus, he would be the father of all living beings on Earth through the fertilising power of rainwater.

Captain Robert FitzRoy of HMS Beagle suggested the practice had developed from earlier ceremonies in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian vessels passing notable headlands.

Between the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, ships came to be moved by steam and the sailors were no longer the same as in the previous centuries. In this period, the people who made the crossing of the equator changed, as the meaning of the ritual did. The practitioners came to be passengers without any great interaction with the workers of the sea, and the feeling of alliance with Neptune and his court was more concerned with entertainment than with the integration of the maritime community claimed by sailors on sailing ships. Corroborating Marc Bloch in Apology for History, Thompson reminds us that, "to the great despair of historians, men do not change their vocabulary every time they change their customs - and this is also true for the vocabulary of rituals" (Thompson, 1977, p.255).

[Níall Beag]

Oh aye, and "rain" is a combination of the sun-god "Ra" with a negative particle "-n", as there's typically no sun when it rains. The French, however, ascribe their rain to Pluto (il pleut) and the Spanish to Jupiter (llueve ~= "Jove").

Of course, "Ra" also occurs in the word "rather", which is an intensifier because it relates to the king of the gods. The root also appears reordered in the word "area", originally "ane-ra" or a single unit of god, combining the Egyptian tradition with the Judeo-Christian notion of the universe as part of God, as well as the post-Renaissance nationalistic view of boundaries as being set by god. The same change of vowel occurs in the Spanish "real" (royal), encoding the idea that the Spanish kings, like the Egyptian pharoes before them, are the annointed heirs of Ra.

Now this is clearly utter nonsense, and I could invent such theories all day. Discussing them with strangers on the internet, however, would make me look like a bit of a weirdo.