Odd first name....

tac foley

Help! We've just been watching the BBC lunchtime news, in which there was a short interview with an Irish gentleman named Jalath Murphy.

Now many of us have had, for one reason or another, had to Anglicise our names simply to get called a reasonable approximation of our Irish names - like me, fer'instance - but my brain hit the stops with this one.

Any ideas, please?

TIA

tac

Zaph

Jarlath misspelled?

tac foley

Zaph wrote: »

Jarlath misspelled?

That's it. Thank you. Not having ever been to the west of Ireland, or ever heard name before, you can understand my confusion.

BTW, a local realty in nearby Brighton ON has a fine upstanding young Irishman there as a broker. Poor guy has had a whale of trouble with people trying out various permutations of his Irish name, with no amount of success.

He's now officially 'George'.

His long-suffering wife, also with an Irish name [Eithne], gave up years back, in spite of the popularity of her professional namesake, and now gets her name written as 'Enya'.

tac

Zaph

When my brother was born the woman in the bed beside my mother had a baby girl. She wanted to call her Eithne, but she was planning to move to the States the following year and knew the child would spend her whole life having her name mispronounced, so she opted for Ethna.

An gal gréine

Zaph wrote: »

When my brother was born the woman in the bed beside my mother had a baby girl. She wanted to call her Eithne, but she was planning to move to the States the following year and knew the child would spend her whole life having her name mispronounced, so she opted for Ethna.

Even in Ireland Eithne doesn't usually get pronounced with the Gaelic 'th'.

deirdremf

And let's not forget poor "Emer".
An Old Irish name, when it was modernised in Irish, it became Eimear, or sometimes Éimear.
Somebody forgot that the M would have been aspirated, and so the modern name should have MH in the middle.

catrionanic

deirdremf wrote: »

And let's not forget poor "Emer".
An Old Irish name, when it was modernised in Irish, it became Eimear, or sometimes Éimear.
Somebody forgot that the M would have been aspirated, and so the modern name should have MH in the middle.

My friend Emer lives in Cardiff and just goes by "Emma" for thinks like taxis, booking restaurants, ordering in Starbucks, etc

I also know a couple of girls called Siobhan and Bronagh who recently posted a picture on Facebook of the coffees they received in a Starbucks in America. They were labelled "Chavon" and "Bruna". Which made me laugh.