Aoife?

[clairemiss79]

I love the name Aoife but living in England I'm worried that it will be constantly mis-pronounced. Does anyone know any aoifes?

Thank god, Germ and Cert, I was starting to wonder if I've gone through life mispronouncing "a"

Having never heard of Aiofe until now, and having a very English terror of mispronouncing Irish names (I end up saying "umm", as we do,) please may I urge you to spell it Ifa? Or Yfa :)

Gorgeous name. We had it on our list but kept having boys

But people will struggle to pronounce it.
The anglicised spelling aren't half as pretty imho.

It makes me think of Aoife from the Maria show, that was the first time I came across it and I thought how pretty it was.

I can't tell the difference between Eefa and Eefer though Might be an English accent thing?

Eefer and Eefa are slightly different in my accent - but I'm from the West Country

I quite like Aoife but many people in England won't know how to pronounce it. I once heard someone say it like 'oif'

In my (rhotic) Irish accent there is a world of difference between EEfa and EEfer..
EEfa is much closer to the right pronunciation.

Thanks for all your replies. I am Irish but we live in England. I love aoife but am also considering Ava. I think the class will be full of Avas though

I think Aoife is really dull.

Sorry.

I don't know any but I do know how to pronounce it. I'd have thought it was well known enough (like Niamh) for pronunciation not to be a problem, but maybe not!

Ifa or Yfa aren't pronounced anything like Aoife as I read them. Maybe because I'm from Wales where Efa is Eva (but pronounced with a short e, like egg, rather than ee).

Blummin' confusin', innit johnny ...

Ee-fa
emphasis on the E,with the fa rhyming with ha

My favourite Irish girls name at the minute.It is very very popular here in Ireland though.

In my accent(west irish) theres a hugh difference between eefa and eefer...completely different.Must be an accent thing

i pronounce it ayy ooo feee i know this i wrong but its just how i see it written and im irish

I wouldn't have a clue how to pronounce it.

Now it has been explained I do recognise it and its a nice name but I would imagine that there are quite a few people like me who wouldn't know how to say it.

But I work with lots of children with names I don't 'know' so that is not a good enough reason for not choosing it

If you like it, use it.

Love it. But I giggle when I think of the vicar of dibley (purposely) pronouncing it 'heifer' regarding a love rival.

I have the Irish name beginning with an N for my dd 12. She hates it, constantly has to correct it. Is always being called stupid names as they read it the way it looks. I wouldnt do it again. Started to hate it about age 7 when she was going to cluba and didnt have me to correct people. I see her cringe when they say a name which is not hers. Dd2 and 3 have names which read as they are written

Ny-am
Nee am
Neyem
Ni-ah
NYAMPH GRRRR

I know three small Aoifes, lovely name (lovely girls!)
From the south-east though not living there now, Eefa and Eefer sound identical when I say them.
Trying to figure out what the Irish name beginning with N is?

Oh, got it. I know 4 of them too!

Niamh. Lovely name as well.

I really like this name, although when we had one in our school the only way her teacher could remember the pronunciation was to think "e for elephant" beforehand to remind her of the eefa sound. Therefore in my head it is always eefa elephant (never out loud though, we always made a real effort to pronounce it correctly!)

It will be incorrectly spelt and pronounced for evermore.... but it is a very pretty name I know an Aoife (lol, I just had to look up the spelling ) and I cannever remember how to spell or say it. I do try but ,to my mind, the pronounciation has no relation to the spelling. It seems like a random collection of letters.
I get the impression that it's getting a lot more popular so more and more people at least those who are not rubbish spellers will recognise it.

I can easily hear the difference between eefa and eefer. (I'm from the West Country too)

I have a foriegn name with an English pronounciation so nobody can spell or pronounce my name either. I can't say it's ever bothered me although that may because I really don't mind if my name is mispronounced. I also often use my 'simple' middle name if I have to give my name in a shop or over the phone.

CoreyHaim, that says a lot more about the lack of intelligence and manners of the people your DD deals with than it does about the name..

I don't understand how people can't just listen to a name and get on with their lives once the two simple syllables have been remembered. So it isn't spelled the way English phonetics work? Big effing deal.

It's not as if there aren't a gazillion words in English that are 'exceptions to the rule' and nobody has to pause and think of elephants (for example) before remembering simple words whose spellings are irregular. It boils down to pure rudeness to make a dog's dinner out of someone's name more than once.

How do you say Dymphna (?) is that the right spelling?
I used to love reading Edna O'Brian books when I was younger but I did struggle with some of the Irish names.

You've nailed the eefa/eefer difference, Math. Irish & West Country accents, and some Scots ones, are rhotic - the rest of us have silent "r"s by comparison.

I think it's unnecessarily rude of you to dismiss us all as ignorant & ill-mannered, though. When an English person takes a best stab at pronunciation, we end up with something like "Neeam" and "Ayofa". It's not on to tell us Irish uses the same alphabet in a different way and we should just fucking learn.

Dymphna is Dim-fna.

Garlic -- I'm not talking about someone looking for the first time at a name spelled on a page and doing their best. I'm talking about a situation where a teacher has to remind herself 'E for elephant' before saying the name of the Aoife in her class. Really? She didn't hear the name the day before and all the previous days back as far as last September? The previous year's teacher never mentioned it? She doesn't hear the other children saying it when they talk together? I'm also talking about a situation where someone has heard the name and repeated it but gets all bogged down when they see it written despite the fact that many English words are not one bit phonetic, but disbelief can apparently be suspended for those words, and they can be pronounced correctly in spite of the GHs or the vowel combinations that could go two or more ways.

Do English people know and understand the fact that German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Icelandic, Italian, Latin, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Polish, Catalan, Turkish, Romanian, Slovenian, Czech, Croatian, Welsh, Scots, Slovak, Finnish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian written languages use the same alphabet yet assign sounds to the letters and combinations of letters that are not found in English? Why not understand that Irish is similar in its assignment of different sounds to the same letters?