More Unpronounceable/Obscure Irish Names

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA5scaGG2iY

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Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117910593#Comment_117910593

155 ways to spell "Kate Lynn" in American

CaitlinCatelinCaytlinCaytelinCatlinCaetlinCaitelinCayetlin Caitlan Catelan Caytlan Caytelan Catlan Caetlan Caitelan Cayetlan Caitlyn Catelyn Caytlyn Caytelyn Catlyn Caetlyn Caitelyn Cayetlyn Caitlynn Catelynn Caytlynn Caytelynn Catlynn Caetlynn Caitelynn Cayetlynn Caitlynne Catelynne Caytlynne Caytelynne Catlynne Caetlynne Caitelynne Cayetlynne Caitlind Catelind Caytlind Caytelind Catlind Caetlind Caitelind Cayetlind Caitland Cateland Caytland Cayteland Catland Caetland Caiteland Cayetland Caitlinn Catelinn Caytlinn Caytelinn Catlinn Caetlinn Caitelinn Cayetlinn Caitlinne Catelinne Caytlinne Caytelinne Catlinne Caetlinne Caitelinne Cayetlinne Kaitlin Katelin Kaytlin Kaytelin Katlin Kaetlin Keightlin Kaitelin Kayetlin Kaitlan Katelan Kaytlan Kaytelan Katlan Kaetlan Keightlan Kaitelan Kayetlan Kaitlyn Katelyn Kaytlyn Kaytelyn Katlyn Kaetlyn Keightlyn Kaitelyn Kayetlyn Kaitlynn Katelynn Kaytlynn Kaytelynn Katlynn Kaetlynn Keightlynn Kaitelynn Kayetlynn Kaitlynne Katelynne Kaytlynne Kaytelynne Katlynne Kaetlynne Keightlynne Kaitelynne Kayetlynne Kaitlind Katelind Kaytlind Kaytelind Katlind Kaetlind Keightlind Kaitelind Kayetlind Kaitland Kateland Kaytland Kayteland Katland Kaetland Keightland Kaiteland Kayetland Kaitlinn Katelinn Kaytlinn Kaytelinn Katlinn Kaetlinn Keightlinn Kaitelinn Kayetlinn KaitlinneKatelinneKaytlinneKaytelinneKatlinneKaetlinneKeightlinneKaitelinneKayetlinne

Also Katelyin, Kaitlen and Caitlon, so 158

Caitlín would be number 159

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117913631#Comment_117913631

Are you commenting about Irish names generally being unpronounceable, or are you commenting about misspellings of Irish-language names rendering them unpronounceable?

If it's the former, then your analysis is a bit off the mark, to be honest. Irish names are pronounceable. If they weren't, no Irish speaker would use them. That rule of thumb doesn't just apply to Irish. So there's no problem pronouncing the name; it's just that you don't know how.

If it's the latter, I have a lot of sympathy for your view. Misspelling a name in any language only causes confusion and leads to difficulties with pronunciation, and people should try not to do it. That applies to any language, not just Irish, but it is a pain in the arse when people do it.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117916444#Comment_117916444

Lee speaks a language which has the following "unpronounceable" placenames:

Rampisham (ransom)

Bicester (rhymes with meister)

Woolfardisworthy (wool-sery)

Leicester (rhymes with pester)

Frome (rhymes with zoom)

Gloucester (rhymes with foster)

Holborn (don't mention the L)

Quernmore (Quorn-Mer)

Mousehole (mou-zel)

Belvoir Castle (first word pronounced beaver)

Leominster (rhymes with Dempster)

Brougham (rhymes with Frome above)

There's a lot more. Of course, they're all pronounceable. You just have to know how.

mcmoustache

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117904638#Comment_117904638

Same here. There was always a mix of the irish names that you mentioned but in by father's and grandfather's generation they all had christian names like Seán/Jonny, Máirtín, Beartla, Pádraig, Séamus, Máire, Muiréad, Áine etc. Bríd/Bidín was always popular with the older folk too though and I'm quite sure that that one's a celtic name but I'm open to correction on that. These days I think there's more of the Irish ones and fewer of the biblical ones being used.

The names you listed are very common out my way too (the other side of cuan an fhir mhóir from your username), but I don't think I've seen people spell other names like Caoileann and Orlaith with "fh" but it's not that complicated when you see those silent letters in lots of other words anyway. That being said, there are too many ways to spell the surname that translates to English as "Connolly".

mcmoustache

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117912811#Comment_117912811

Not a name I'd give to someone myself, but you're right. It's pronounced exactly as it is spelled and spelled exactly as it sounds.

Reminds me of that old joke.

"That's a very unusual name, you don't hear that every day."

"I do."

is_that_so

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117917369#Comment_117917369

These are still recognisable vowel and consonant patterns we could have a stab at and TBH evolved from ancient local pronunciation of placenames. We have the same here with names.

Throw in a Grzegorz, Malgorzata, Grunhilde, Maialen or even an Alexandre and people will struggle to get them right. Knowing doesn't mean you can actually do it as many people lose the ability to hear and form new sounds accurately even from early adulthood.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117918072#Comment_117918072

Wait what now?

In none of the cases I listed is there any connection between the vowel and consonant patterns you can read, and the vowel and consonant patterns you can hear. Any native English speaker who relies on their knowledge of English spelling and speech to read those placenames and say them out loud to locals will only make the locals herniate themselves laughing. And that is native English speakers in England, the home of the English language, dealing with English placenames. So any English speaker who wants to have a laugh at unpronounceable words needs to start with the English language before proceeding to take the piss out of any other language.

And that's before you try to rationally explain to non-English speakers why cough, rough, bough, though, through and lough don't rhyme with each other.

On the other hand, whenever I see Irish words I know exactly how they're going to sound even if I've never seen them before, because the spelling and pronunciation are connected to each other, linear, and rational. Words in the language are readily pronounceable, as long as you've learned how to do it. If someone hasn't learned how to do it, that doesn't make the words unpronounceable; it just means they don't know how.

mariaalice

Officials making a guess at how a name is spelled instead of asking annoys me slightly. Ailbhe written down as Alva that sort of thing.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117921512#Comment_117921512

This. Irish spelling is regular. English spelling is, famously, wildly irregular; it's the curse of anybody trying to learn English as a foreign language. When I hear English-speakers sneering at Irish spelling all I can think is "have you guys no self-awareness at all?"

is_that_so

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117921512#Comment_117921512

You're coming at this from the perspective of someone with an interest in language who seems to think people can be fixed. By adulthood, listeners are typically insensitive to most contrasts of sounds not found in their native language. In other words people lose that ability to distinguish sounds quite young, which is why we try to get kids into language. Because they also find themselves in a type of monolingual environment where they only need to distinguish a specific range of sounds, some sounds are almost foreign, like the problems a lot of Americans have with almost any other accent.

Now some people can perhaps be trained but a further factor is the motivation to even get sounds right and we all quite quickly settle into a groove of good enough.

20silkcut

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117913159#Comment_117913159

There was a German footballer back in the 80’s called Horst hrubesch jack charlton used to pronounce it as rubbish.

iamwhoiam

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117922242#Comment_117922242

Makes me giggle when English speakers cannot believe a bh in Siobhan sounds like a V .What about the gh in laugh sounding like an f then ?

is_that_so

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117922414#Comment_117922414

Oddly enough the suggestion is that it came from a mispronunciation of a -ch sound as /f/ ! It is from the same roots as the German verb lachen. Early English spelling was a complete mess and any spelling of words was used. That version would have come from the first efforts to standardise spelling it in the16th century.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117922437#Comment_117922437

Pretty well all languages had varied spellings and no canonical "correct" spelling until quite late on; the idea of standard spelling is a modern invention. Mostly people tried to spell words in the way they pronounced them and, since pronunciation varied across regions and dialects , spellings could vary widely. This is especially true of English because what started off as a purely Anglo-Saxon language was changed radically by the infusion of a large amount of Norman French, which was already a written language and had its own spelling conventions.

Laugh is an Ango-Saxon word and would originally have been pronounced with a gutteral sound, which is what the -gh represents. In variant spellings the sound might be represented just with a -h- or with a -g- or with a now-lost letter called "yogh" which looked like this: Ȝ. It's only in nearly modern times - say, the beginning of the sixteenth century - that we start to come across spellings like laff, laffe, lauwf, lauf; Shakespeare uses loffe. So that tells us when the modern pronunciation began to appear, at least in some parts of the country. (NB it's not a "mispronunciation"; just an evolving pronunciation.)

If the pronunciation shift had happened earlier, the standard spelling might now end in -f or -ff. But by the sixteenth century literacy in England was quite widespread and there was a large corpus of literature in English, so the -gh ending was already pretty well established and, in the event, it was retained. Nobody decided this; it was just the way things panned out. After the mid-seventeenth century no educated writer uses anything but a -gh spelling.

Badly Drunk Boy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117922356#Comment_117922356

I think Ulysses1874 is saying that there are pronunciation rules in both Irish and English, but the examples he gave are where those rules are majorly flouted in English, whereas names like Siobhán are sticking to the Irish rules. The matter of how somebody's brain is trained and rules engrained is a separate matter, even though this obviously affects how you view and pronounce languages that you are not familiar with.

A Polish girl I work with told me that I was the first Irish person to pronounce her surname correctly. This shows that you are right about people usually sticking to their basic knowledge and saying what comes easiest and most naturally, but it also shows that somebody like me, a non-linguist with no formal study or practical experience of Polish can still get things right (and in my late 40s too!).

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117922414#Comment_117922414

If they were less ignorant, they might be open to learning that in Spanish 'b" and 'v' are identical sounds

is_that_so

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117923127#Comment_117923127

It depends where you are. In parts of South America they use the two original sounds.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117923206#Comment_117923206

I am going by my South American friends. It was identical for them.

That's beside the point that it is not unusual to have the same sound for two different letters, or combinations

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117922356#Comment_117922356

Different languages sound different. Everybody knows that, even stupid people. If all languages sounded the same they wouldn't be different languages, duh. But despite knowing this, I've lost count of the number of times I've heard people come out with the same stuff about Irish-language names being unpronounceable. They're not unpronounceable; it's just that the people spoofing off don't know how to say them. It really is that simple. The people who do this don't need to be fixed. But it would be good if they could shut up or alternatively if they could say something that was actually amusing, actually interesting, or above all else actually original.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117923085#Comment_117923085

That is it. It is difficult if not impossible to find Irish words that don't follow the expected link between how they look and how they sound. For the non-native speaker, Irish is therefore an easier language if you are trying to get to grips with sounds and pronunciations. Grammar is a whole other ball game, but that's not what this thread is about.

I've recently had the same experience as yours, being told by people from Denmark, Poland and Moldova that I got their names right, but that most Irish people don't even try. With that in mind, it's not exactly difficult to figure out how to say names, whether it's Caoimhe, Violeta, Majbritt or Bláithín.

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117922414#Comment_117922414

And the ph in phoenetic.