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honourablejester · 2 years ago

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Some more Irish pronunciation cheats (these are the ones I don’t really remember the reasons and rules for, but they usually work):

‘Aoi’ is pronounced ‘ee’. Just roll with it, it is. So Aoife (Ee-fa), Saoirse (Seer-sha), Caoimhe (Kwee-va).

An ‘e’ at the end of a word is pronounced ‘a’. See all of the above, and also Gaeilge, the word for the Irish language, which is pronounced gwayl-ga.

An ‘s’ immediately followed or preceded by a narrow vowel, so an ‘i’ or an ‘e’, essentially has a secret ‘h’ attached, so you pronounce it ‘sh’. So Saoirse (Seer-sha), Siobhán (Shov-awn), Aisling (Ash-ling).

‘C’ is always hard. ‘K’ doesn’t exist in the Irish alphabet except for more modern loan words, so ‘c’ gets the ‘k’ sound and ‘s’ gets the ‘s’ sound.

(IIRC, the letters early Irish didn’t have were ‘j’,’k’,’q’,’v’,’w’,’x’,’y’ and ‘z’).

Round vowels following ‘c’ can make it go towards a ‘q’/’kw’ sound, again, as in Caoimhe.

Round/broad vowels (‘a’, ‘o’, ‘u’) often add a bit of ‘w’ inflection to preceding consonants, actually.

The hardness of ‘c’ means that its is one of the letters that isn’t really softened by a following ‘h’, hence why she said the ‘ach’ in Darach above is pronounced as in Bach, that sort of phlegmy, Germanic, vampire hiss sort of aspirated ‘k’ sound.

‘gh’ and ‘dh’ are often very soft, by contrast, and can sometimes basically vanish entirely and become silent. So the place name that causes people trouble on the train all the time, Dún Laoghaire, would be pronounced Doon Lay-ra. It got anglicised as ‘Dun Leary’, but what have you. ‘gh’ and ‘dh’ often vanish from the pronunciation from a word. Alternately, as I said above, ‘dh’ often makes a ‘y’ sort of sound. So radharc, which means view, is pronounced rye-ark.

A general take away here is that letters in Irish are often influenced or mutated in pronunciation by where they are in a word and what letters are around them. Sounding things out letter by letter doesn’t really work too well in Irish.

But, once you’ve got some general rules, you can get the idea. So if you have a less common Irish name, let’s say Naoise, you can now get an idea why it’s Nee-sha, instead of Now-i-se, or whatever the English-speaking first instinct is?

Last year, the lead singer of The 1975, Matt Healy, managed to offend a whole lot of Gaelgoirí (Irish speakers) when he appeared to mock a fan’s name – Dervla – at a meet-and-greet.

Healy isn’t alone, though, when it comes to anglophone bafflement at Irish names. A recent study based on an analysis of Google searches revealed the words that British people have the most difficulty pronouncing. The names Aoife, Saoirse, Niamh and Siobhán occupy places in the top 10.

And it’s not exclusively a British problem: I always cringe watching US talkshows where the host quizzes their Irish guest (usually Saoirse Ronan) on the pronunciation of their and other Irish names.

I’ve heard every possible variation of my own name from non-Irish people. It’s not uncommon in Ireland; in secondary school, there were four Niamhs in my class. But I rarely come across an English person who is familiar with it, despite the proximity of our two countries.

In case you don’t know, it’s pronounced “Neev” or “Nee-av”, either is perfectly acceptable. The prefix Ní means “daughter of”. My surname is trickier, and has even tripped up a few Irish people; it can be translated as Herbert, and is pronounced “her-a-vard”.

When I was living in London, I quickly learned that saying Niamh at the counter in a coffee shop or over the phone to make a booking simply wouldn’t fly. This led to the invention of what I call my “Starbucks name”. Anything easily pronounceable with a simple spelling would do. Mia, Sophie and Rose were among my common aliases.

Speaking to others reveals a litany of similar experiences. Aoibhe Ní Shúilleabháin, a designer and teacher, spent two years at college in England having her name mispronounced and disrespected. (Her first name is pronounced “Ay-vah”.) More than one lecturer resorted to calling her “blondie”.

She tells me: “I was asked to say, ‘Three hundred and thirty three trees’” – a tongue-twister that does the rounds on TikTok – “more often than I was asked to repeat my name.” She recalls the lack of interest when she attempted to explain that Irish and English are different languages with different pronunciation rules.

Clearly, the sensitivities at play here are rooted in history: Ireland was colonised by the English and our national language was all but wiped out. A language revival began in earnest in the 19th century, but it’s never quite recovered. Ireland’s most recent census shows that about 40% of Ireland’s population can speak Irish. The English destroyed our language once before, so every little throwaway comment and scoff at our names hurts a little bit more – and ultimately becomes just tiresome. A handful of people even remark, “Oh! I didn’t know Ireland had its own language,” when I tell them about my name.

Writer Darach Ó Séaghdha is all too familiar with these difficulties. (The “rach” in Darach is pronounced like “Bach”, he says.)He hosted a podcast called Motherfoclóir, a podcast about the Irish language and culture, and whenever there were guests on with Irish names, “inevitably the episode would turn into group therapy”. There was one bad experience, he recalls, when he was told that his surname “looked like a wifi password”. But he decided to give his children Irish names, too. It’s a common trend, he says, “because parents with Irish names have been battle-hardened”.

Like the others I spoke to for this piece, writer and director Rioghnach (think “Ree-nock”)Ní Ghrioghair believes that a sense of superiority among English speakers is to blame for the constant mistreatment of Irish names. But she’s defiant. “We are going to scrutinise the British for any transgression regarding the pronunciation of our names,” and other things, she tells me, like British media claiming Irish actors as their own during awards seasons.

There is no easy crash-course I can give to you on the pronunciation of Irish names, but you can always try out “how to pronounce”-style websites (which themselves can be contested). But the simplest and most reliable solution is perhaps just to politely ask an Irish person – and listen attentively to what they say. I may have accepted that English people are very rarely going to get my name right on the first go, but I appreciate a well-intentioned effort. Just don’t laugh at it, please.

#language #gaeilge #irish #pronunciation #continuing cheat sheet

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