Welsh name in England?

[floravus]

I am Welsh, DH is English and we live in England. We are having a boy and like the name Gruffudd (pronounced Griffith) but I'm worried it will be too hard work for DS growing up in England. We did think about Griffin which isn't technically Welsh but along similar lines, but then we thought we should either go full Welsh or just find an English name.

Thoughts?

Try placing your finger on your windpipe instead.

I really can't... I've tried saying "th" as if I am going to say "that" but then saying the other one etc, also windpipe, it genuinely sounds the same to me, but then so does the aw in "auction" and "awesome" and I've been told they are different too!

sleepyhiraeth
How can the next vowel sound different, because they both have the same vowel sound ?
How about thick and those, do they sound the same to you ?

Similarly, Ynyr is UN-irr

Names ending in ir (Meinir, Eilir, Mair...) tend to be difficult, as English people will say the ir as ee-uh.

Dwynwen sounds a bit like Twin-wen but D instead of T.

Actually it's sort of Doo-in but one syllable, followed by wen.

MikeUniformMike but you are talking to someone who's native accent doesn't differentiate between vowel sounds. Pier, peer, pare, pear, pair... All the same to me. Alan, Allen, Ellen, Alun, Alin... I can't hear (or pronounce) the difference. So to my ear Emir and Emyr are exactly the same.

MonaChopsis
Emir is em-EER
Emyr is EM-irr

The stress is on a different syllable. What accent do you have?
Do you get that there are two ways of saying entrance or revel?

MikeUniformMike I'm a Kiwi. It's not a case of failing to recognise difference in emphasis though, because even in the examples you gave you indicated the second syllable with different letters. So (and trust me on this one) if I can't differentiate between 'eer' and 'irr', if I say 'EM-eer' it still sounds to Welsh ears like I'm saying emir, not Emyr. It's a bit like the difference between 'rake' and 'lake' to a Chinese person learning English (there isn't one) or the difficulty English speakers have in differentiating rising and falling tones in Korean, or between 'chee' and 'shee' in Mandarin. The difference isn't there for everyone because our brains have become adapted to our native accents.

www.parentingcounts.org/information/timeline/recognition-of-sounds-of-own-language-complete-may-have-difficulty-discriminating-certain-sounds-of-foreign-languages-later-in-l/

I'm English, partner's grandparents were both Welsh and he definitely sees himself as more Welsh than English if that makes sense?!! I also have Welsh family and would move to Wales if we could! We both live in England.

Our child will definitely have a Welsh name, IMO they are nicer on the whole than English names and unusual in England too. Cerys for a girl. I love Iestyn (say 'Yestin') for a boy but he's not sure!

Mike we were taught in school not to pronounce Dwynwen like that, but more like d-OIN-wen. (Oi as in groin) How you describe it is how my brain naturally pronounces it but it was drummed into us that that's wrong.

Iestyn is not the same sound as ” yes tin” , it doesn’t have the Y sound at the start.

Ie , ei, and eu sounds are difficult for non Welsh speakers. Along with The more obvious Ch, And Ll , there are other alphabet letters like Ng and Rh that can be very difficult for non Welsh people to hear. ( The difference between Rhys and the Anglicised version Rees ) I think non Welsh people struggle with our vowels as they are not the same as in English , and unless you have grown up with them are hard to grasp.
North Wales Welsh also uses slightly different resonators, so is another sound again .

It's definitely not DOIN-wen.

Another letter combination that is difficult is
ae. e.g., Aeron

Ngh is difficult to explain. It's ng followed by h. No g sound. Angharad is Ang HARR-ad. Not Ann Garrud

Yestyn, I would say as YESS-din. I like it. Welsh for Justin.
Cerys will get Cerise, Cherries ..., Carys is easier but dated.

I did think MonaChopsis might be from NZ. I know a Ben who seems to call himself Bin.

I would run a name past a few non-Welsh speakers and a few Welsh speakers before naming a child it.

Mike wouldn’t you have a softer start to Iestyn, so not like a crisp English yes, more like i followed swiftly by e. I use my mouth slightly differently for those two sounds.
Agree with Ae too . English people tend to say eye.

No. Are you from South Wales SirVix?

I am originally from North Wales but have moved about a lot. In areas where not many speak Welsh like North East Wales you get a mixture of Welsh-speakers, Welsh people who don't speak Welsh, and people who are not Welsh. I've heard a lot of names mangled. Even seemingly easy names like Huw (it's not Hoo), Mari (it's not Mah-ri or Marie), Arwel (it's not Ah-wul) and Dewi (it's not Dowey).

Huw is not Hugh but not far off.
Mari is exactly like Marry
Arwel is ARR-well
Dewi is like Derry if said by someone who says w for r like Jonathan Ross, or Devvy said by someone who says w for v

While we may not know how to pronounce it at first he can just tell them. I know Eildihs, Niamh's who manage

Mike oh yes, the murdering of Huw. I am from Westish Wales, with one N wales parent, and one S Wales parent whose family were half from W Wales. I have moved about a bit too. Children in Welsh medium education, and have grown up in West Wales they have slightly different pronunciation from me on some words.
.Arwel said like Ah well, annoys me immensely for some reason. I had an uncle Illtyd...I don’t think he ever left Wales.

We are a bilingual family and accept that all our names will sound different in our two different languages (Japanese and English). It's just the way it is.

It's reasonable to ask that people give "the closest approximation that they can make with the sounds of their language"--it's not reasonable to ask that they start actually trying to reproduce the phonemes and phonetic structure of another language while speaking their own!

So if my DH had the Japanese name "Shosuke," it would be reasonable to explain to non-Japanese speakinG people that the closest pronunciation in English is something like "Shossu-Kay" or "Shoss-kay"as opposed to "Shoh-Sook" or "Shoh-Syook" or something like that. But there is no way I would sit there telling people "Oh, you have to pronounce the 'shoss'and then when you get to the 'u' you have to bend your lips into shape of a kind of short 'oo' sound but whisper it rather than saying it, and all syllables have to be said with an equal weight with no stress like you do in English, and oh, Japanese uses pitch, so make sure you pronounce the pitch slightly higher on....." Like, forget it. If people are speaking English, an close-enough approximation is fine and it's not fair to expect people to start learning the phonemes that are not found in any language they actually speak.

Similarly, if I had a daughter called "Elaine", I'd make sure that Japanese speakers understood that the second syllable is pronounce "lane" rather than "line," but I am hardly going to expect them to reproduce the English "L" sound. The Japanese "r" (a clipped sound that is a mixture of a d, l and r!) is fine as the "closest" Japanese sound, and no disrespect is intended if people pronounce Elaine in a Japanese way when they are having a conversation in Japanese.

Absolutely kokeshi - that's how I feel about the 'th' ending of Gruffudd. Close enough would be fine!

SirVix, Illtyd is nice. I like lots of names with ll in them (Esyllt, Lleucu, Llio, Llyr...) but some people can't distinguish between Ll and Ch, or they say ll as thl.

I think go with it as long as you aren’t looking for perfection in pronunciation from English speakers. I’m English, DH is NI and we live in NI. DD is Meredith - a totally anglicised welsh name. I think the welsh pronunciation is pretty but also really like the anglicised version, which we use. DD on the way will be called Seren. I agonised over this choice for a while, as I can pronounce this as a welsh person could, DH can’t, he doesn’t have the right vowel sounds, and neither will anybody around her as they all have the same accent! I think it sounds pretty in an NI accent. A bit like how I say Ellen and Elin differently, but my NI friends say them the same. Equally a lot of Irish names sound pretty in England, but they are not pronounced completely correctly. It would be a shame if nobody used them for that reason though.

Oh and I would know how to pronounce the name you have chosen, but I have welsh family. A lot of people might need to be told, but people need to be told how to pronounce my name, and I get by!

Bryn?

He will be called Gruff-ud every time he has contact with someone new.
I have a name that just can't be pronounced by someone who doesn't speak a certain language. It's a PITA.