Journalism and Cycling 2: the difficult second album

Saddled, it was called.

Yeah, I noticed they pronounce it sort of the Scottish way in UK media, even though there's no "c" in it. I think Irish people in the UK media just put up with however their names end up being pronounced. Can't even get them to stop pronouncing Irish names like Italian names (KinSELLa, CosTELLo).

McGrath is another one. I think those ones are a little more understandable, because, even though English also uses 'h' to soften consonants (Philip, the, wrath, and so on) the idea of softening consonants that way until they actually disappear is foreign to most English speakers. But O'Doherty helpfully doesn't have the consonant written in the first place.

(The Gallagher brothers of Oasis, as far as I know, pronounce the second "g", so I presume it was just to fit in when they were kids, because I can't believe their parents ever pronounced it that way.)

"Kane" is probably the original pronunciation of Keane. "ea" used to be pronounced as it is in "great" in pretty much all words, but the "ee" pronunciation gradually took over. Ireland retains quite a few ("mate" for "meat", "bate" for "beat"). You hear it in the States in some places, with "mayzhur" for "measure".

There's a line in Shakespeare that has "raisin" and "reason" in close proximity, and it's a pun, because they used to sound identical.

Mentioned here anyway:

"Similarly, we remember Charles Stuart Parnell as “ParNELL”, placing the emphasis on the second syllable of his name, though it is believed he would have pronounced his name “PARnell”."

https://avondhupress.ie/what-politician-cares-for-our-past-let-alone-our-future/

They normally say it in Irish, even in English broadcasts. All the people I know from there pronounce as you've done there (or more normally locally it's just known as Kilmac tbh).

What I think happened there is that the name was anglicised to Dun Leary, which at the time would have been pronounced by an English-speaker as Doon Lairy, close to the correct Irish pronunciation.

As pronunciations changed, people saw 'Dun Leary' and pronounced it as 'Done Leery'.

By the time the common spelling changed back to Dun Laoghaire, the incorrect pronunciation had become established.

I would guess that other anglicisations reflected the pronunciation when they were coined, but again the drift in pronunciation of vowels and diphthongs such as 'ea' caused a new pronunciation to become established. 'Devil' and 'kettle' would have been pronounced by Shakespeare as 'divil' and 'kittle', so 'Ennis' would have sounded like 'Inis' when it was coined, and 'Kerry' like 'Ciarraí'.

AFAIK the strangulated Received Pronunciation dates from the 18th century. Before that, English accents were much stronger. Shakespeare would probably have sounded like a Cork pirate. "Ta bay arr not ta bay, that is the kess-tee-on".

By the way, ARX, thanks for that observation. I knew about the drift in English pronunciations, but I never connected it to the idea that the spellings in the 1600s were much better approximations of the Irish.