IRISH BABY NAMES: Hot Off The Press

February 18th, 2009 at 9:40 am

I love Sorcha, Aoife, Eoin, and Fionn. Too bad I can’t use them! Did you plan for the book to come out on St. Patrick’s Day?

February 18th, 2009 at 11:06 am

Yes!

February 18th, 2009 at 2:52 pm

Lulu & Harvey surprise me on these lists!

And I love Eithne, Orla & Roisin, Cillian, Cormac, Declan & Fionn! Awesome list today, Can’t wait for St. pat’s and the new book! (I think I have all of them now)

February 18th, 2009 at 4:58 pm

I will be interested in reading your book as I enjoy reading your blog, but… some of those are wrong :/ Ailbhe is pronounced more like al-va, and anglicised as the lovely Elva. Orlaith is pronounced exactly like Orla; in fact Orla is an anglicised spelling of Orlaith. Lochlan is Scottish as the Irish word for ‘loch’ is ‘lough’.

February 18th, 2009 at 5:42 pm

Emz–thanks for writing, though your post was a little disturbing. We really labored to get the pronunciations right, using 10-12 references for each name, and our British publisher even ran them by two academic experts. The problem for us was that there was so little agreement among the ‘experts’, what with local pronunciation variations etc. Just checking one name you cite, Orlaith, I see that one source says that Orlagh is pronounced OR-la but that Orlaith is pronounced OR-lee. Are you a native Irish speaker>

February 18th, 2009 at 5:52 pm

when I was in Ireland, I found that some Gaelic words were extremely hard to pronounce. Sometimes pronunciation gets lost in translation since our mouths are not used to moving in those positions. Don’t feel bad

February 18th, 2009 at 5:52 pm

when I was in Ireland, I found that some Gaelic words were extremely hard to pronounce. Sometimes pronunciation gets lost in translation since our mouths are not used to moving in those positions. Don’t feel bad

February 19th, 2009 at 4:16 am

There was a Tamsin in Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, which is where I first heard the name. I really adore Tamsin (I believe he used it as a nickname for Thomasin), but would be afraid to use it due to the whole “Tammy” issue! It’s a shame, because Tamsin is truly a lovely, lovely name!

February 19th, 2009 at 5:23 pm

I’m sorry linda, I didn’t mean to worry you. I do love this site and I clearly come here a lot and value the information here.

I’m not a native Irish speaker myself so I’m probably not qualified to have commented. But I do live in an area with a very high proportion of Irish names and was surprised by some of the pronunciations you’d listed.

Having said that, of course you’re right in mentioning regional variations. I’ve come across Oisin, for example, pronounced as uh-sheen, aw-sheen and oh-sheen in different places. Ailbhe and Orlaith were the ones that really surprised me as I’ve never come across them pronounced in those ways before – though they may well be, in other places. There is no standardised Irish pronunication, after all.

I was probably being ower picky about Lochlan. Scots Gaelic and Irish are pretty similar so there’s bound to be some crossover (Aoife, for example).

I’m looking forward to the book and would be interested in buying it if it’s being published in the UK..?

February 19th, 2009 at 5:36 pm

Thanks–actually the UK edition came out before the US, so you should be able to find it–published by HarperCollins.
There’s a website that has Frank McCourt pronouncing the Irish names out loud, and listening to them you can see how they might be interpreted in several different ways on paper.

February 20th, 2009 at 4:18 pm

Yes, I’ve been on that website before. I saw Ailbe on it pronounced as al-bay, but there’s no h in that (I understand that the h would make it al-va).

I’ll definitely have a look for the book next time I’m in the shops.

February 25th, 2009 at 10:45 am

Im Irish and over here Ailbhe is definitely pronounced al-va, Orlaith is just the Irish spelling of Orla, they are pronounced the same way, Eithne is pronounced eth-na, never heard the EN-ya prnounciation here, Fionn is normally pronounced fi-uh-nn, its hard to write the pronounciations but similar to that and Niall is normally pronounced NY-all but I have heard the neel version used sometimes, I hope this helps!

February 25th, 2009 at 12:10 pm

I wish we’d been able to consult you when we were working on the pronunciations, Sarah! We had several expert opinions but apparently many of them were wrong! Thanks for the clarification.

March 5th, 2009 at 8:32 pm

Some of these have been corrected already, but here are pronouciations that are off. (Congrats on getting mine though!)

EITHNE = ETH-na
ORLAITH = OR-la
SORCHA = SOR-ka
AILBHE (ALL-bay) unisex
NIALL = Nile (like the river)
TADHG = TIE-g

March 11th, 2009 at 11:38 pm

I love learning about names popular in other countries. Can we have an Italian names hot off the press soon??

March 11th, 2009 at 11:49 pm

Hmm, that will take some digging, but we’ll give it a try.

July 12th, 2009 at 10:49 pm

Eoin is pronounced “own”.

November 5th, 2009 at 9:17 am

Love the post. The only thing about being Irish is I’m not keen on Irish names all my cousins names are up there and friends too ha! One thing as well
AILBHE is pronounced ALL- VA
EITHNE – ETH- NA

And Orlaith is pronounced same as Orla just different spelling.
Also Fionn is pronounced FI-UNN.