Alasdhair - have you come across the spelling?

[purpleliza]

We are struggling to find a name for DC3. We both like Alasdhair but I rejected it for DS1 because I knew the spelling was unusual and would be constantly written wrong. We have to use this spelling because it is passed down in DH's family. We have a traditional and fairly common Scottish surname but live in the south of England. Since this first argument, DD1 has been named Isobel which is constantly spelt wrong so I guess I am used to it now but I still have some reservations because no children seemed to have been named recently with this spelling at all.

Is this spelling common/regarded as normal in Scotland?
If you saw this name written down would you know how to pronounce it?
Do you think I am committing my child to a lifetime of name-spelling grief?

If you google it the only person alive with this name seems to be Stella Macartney's husband!

Thanks for your thoughts

I agree that Alasdhair looks wrong. The standard Gaelic spelling is Alasdair or Alisdair. The h is unnecessary.

But then I'm an Isobel (Scots family so I have the Scots spelling) and am used to having my name constantly mispelt as Isabel, Isabell, Isabelle, Liza, Elizabeth, Isobelle, Isabella etc etc. I'm named from my grandmother who insisted her grandchild wasn't called Isabel as she'd been as she hated the nickname Isa so the parents went with the more traditional Scots spelling. Mind I was almost Ishbel.

Ooh, Ishbel is lovely!

When I'm talking about a soft 'd', OBaA, I'm thinking of the way the name Alasdair is pronounced by my DH, who is from the north of Scotland near Inverness. It has a softer pronunciation than an English 'd' - kind of closer to the 'th' sound in 'the' rather than the hard 'd' of e.g. dog. Maybe he just has a weird accent!

For Oscar, yes, it's probably not a traditional name in Scotland (not that I know of) but names like that from Celtic mythology - Finn, Oisin/Ossian, Maeve, Tristan etc - started to be used around the time of the Celtic Revival, at the end of the last century. Maybe more in Ireland, Wales and Cornwall than in Scotland though. Oscar Wilde's mother was part of the Celtic Revival movement in Ireland which is why he was named Oscar. I wonder if he's the main inspiration for people who choose the name these days??

In answer to the original question, I have never come across that spelling and it looks "wrong" to me. Am not Scottish though so I may not count . The first four spellings on suzikettles' list are familar to me.

Isobel is IMO a fairly well known (and lovely) spelling. I can see that people may not automatically spell it with an "o" but it doesn't look incorrect or unusual at all IMO.

Not a gaelic speaker but a d inside a word is unvoiced i.e, sounded like a t. In this case we have lenition, when lenited the dh can have two different sounds, when next to a broad vowel (a, o, u)it has a gh sound a bit like ghost, with more aspiration, next to a slender vowel it has a y sound a bit like english yes. However, dh is often not sounded inside a word - therefore Alasdhair shouldn't work as you would pronounce 'Alasair' - or at least pronounce with a gh sound.

Thanks all for your continued responses to this. I think the consensus is that it looks wrong. One of my original concerns was that my bil (who has Alasdhair as a middle name) was constantly corrected at school when he wrote his full name even when he tried to object.

Inmyprime, thanks for interesting info. on celtic revival. Tristan is also a name I like (have to convince DH however). Oscar was actually chosen on a whim when he was born because he was very early and we had not really finished the Alasdhair argument properly. However, I couldn't imagine him being called anything else now and despite the name's popularity, he is the only one at his school.

Do come back and tell us how you get on with the family! It's all very well me us sounding off about it on here, but I know it's very different trying to balance all the competing pressures and family dynamics.

Especially if you have to tell your father-in-law that his own name is spelt wrong...