Irish names help!

[nothingseasy]

Hiya,
I'm calling out to all Irish speakers please.

I want to call my baby Ayveen In Irish. I've established from other threads that it's not Aoibheann or Aoibhinn or anything beginning with Aoi as this makes an ee sound. However nobody can conclusively say how it should be spelled.

I'd like to know what letters (diphthong/triphthong) make the aye/ay sound I am looking for. Do they exist in Irish?

Alternatives I've seen are

Éabhaoin
Éimhín
Aibhín

I personally favour the Aibhín but does ai in Irish make the sound ay?

Please help it's driving me mad!!

We are living in England and I want to keep a connection to my Irish heritage so I want an Irish name. We have trawled through them all and this is the only one we liked so when we found out it wasn't even said right we were devastated.

Please don't tell me not to bother with an Irish name in England or that I shouldn't give it an Irish name because they will have trouble e.t.c.

Help resolving the spelling is really all I am after.

Thank you x

Connor

Here you go @nothingseasy

The pronunciation of both forms is different in the dialects.

This is from @SeanChailleach post & my point too.

I see Sean has been along to clarify her name for you - so I don't need to explain Seán (boy's name) vs Sean (meaning old)!

I am just 😱 at your posts & tone so I'll leave it at this. I live in Ireland. I speak Irish. I know many people who speak Irish. I know many people with Irish names. We are not using 'anglicised' versions of names!

This is how we, Irish speakers, pronounce them.

@LizzieAnt

I take the points you're making. That's fair enough.

I still think it's important to realise that many Irish speakers use these names with the pronunciations I've specified, and it's entirely correct that they do so.

Eg in my Munster upbringing, and where Niall is a very common name, it was always 'Nye-al' I heard, including in my frequent trips up Gaeltacht areas!

Yes @SeanChailleach please elaborate

@EarringsandLipstick

I do thank you for you input.

Your tone was aggressive from the start and so perhaps I was a little back to you.

You seem close minded on the issue when a little research would show you it's not as easy as saying "this is how it's said 100%"

I would have liked a more open discussion with you where points are made based on language rather than "that's how Me and my friends have always said it"

If you'd like to continue with more open discussion then I'd love to hear it but if not then that is fine too.

Short story:
The spelling most used for the name is Aoibheann, which originates from Old Irish "oíbind", which comes from "oíb" + "finn"

www.libraryireland.com/names/women/aoibheann-eavan.php
dil.ie/33596

As a word, the Modern Irish spelling is "aoibhinn", and some people do use this spelling for the name.
Why is "Aoibheann" pronounced "Ay-veen" and not "ee-van" by some poeple? This is my theory: that the original name was two words, which today would be written in Modern Irish "Aobh fhinn" or "Aoibh fhinn", except the presence of the bh undoes the lenition of the f and voices it to give the v sound. Conversely, the slender f at the start of "finn" narrows the bh making it more likely to sound like v than w anyway.
"Finn" isn't on teanglann, but the very similar "binn" is:
www.teanglann.ie/en/fuaim/binn has a long nasal i for both Connacht and Munster
This leads me to wonder whether the Old Irish original was actually "oíb binn", which isn't a big stretch (binn usually means sweet-sounding). That would give "Aobh bhinn".
Not sure if you'd want to go with a spelling "Aobh-bhinn" although I think it would satisfy the pronunciation.

That's the short answer.
Off to party in the cistín!

[quote nothingseasy]@EarringsandLipstick

I do thank you for you input.

Your tone was aggressive from the start and so perhaps I was a little back to you.

You seem close minded on the issue when a little research would show you it's not as easy as saying "this is how it's said 100%"

I would have liked a more open discussion with you where points are made based on language rather than "that's how Me and my friends have always said it"

If you'd like to continue with more open discussion then I'd love to hear it but if not then that is fine too.
[/quote]
I don't think I was aggressive, just quite frustrated.

I find your post incredibly patronising. You are also entirely misrepresenting what I said - I most certainly did not say, nor imply, that my only point was 'this is how I & my friends say it'.

You're not keen to hear or accept my points. No problem. Others have given you the info you are looking for & Sean's post just now is, as always, incredibly detailed & interesting so I'm sure that'll help too.

Good luck with the baby, whatever you decide re name.

@SeanChailleach
Thank you for looking into this. I think I followed most of it🤣😳

"Not sure if you'd want to go with a spelling "Aobh-bhinn" although I think it would satisfy the pronunciation"

Mmm I'm not sure tbh. I suppose it can't be combined to make Aobhinn because of the broad and slender rule? Is that right?

Probably why the i was thrown in to make Aoibhinn? Do you think?

@EarringsandLipstick
Yes, I agree with you that Niall/Nye-al is by far the most widely used. I'm in Munster too and it's the default pronunciation mostly. That doesn't alter the fact that the name is pronounced Neil in the Irish language though. Think of how diall, or ciall or giall are pronounced. Giall means hostage too so Niall of the nine hostages rhymed quite nicely in the original Irish.

@EarringsandLipstick

I felt you weren't open to other peoples opinions and points. I've been researching this a lot!! And there are many other Irish speakers who disagree with you. I just wanted some nuance discussion. Not shutting it down which I felt you were doing. I apologise if I have misrepresented you.

Again, I am thankful to anyone who takes the time to discuss this with me.

@LizzieAnt

🙈🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

What! Have I picked this up right? Your saying Niall is pronounced Neil in Irish? Omg really? I just thought that was the English for Niall?!

I can't cope with anymore 😂🤣😂

@SeanChailleach

Can I just ask do you think then from your explanation that it's right/okay to pronounce Aoibhinn as ay-veen ?

Hi OP, I know somebody who had the exact same dilemma as you and went with Aebhín, Ae as in the ubiquitous cupán tae. They also knew Aoibheann should be Ee-vin as decent amount of knowledge about Irish and how spellings work, but preferred the Ay sound, and didn't mind that they were inventing their own name so to speak. Don't see why you shouldn't use a sound you prefer and spell it that way.

I know an Aedín spelled like that and that RTÉ newscaster Aengus Mac Grianna is Ae too. Added advantage of ae being an accepted spelling of ay in English too, at least if I see Mae/Rae I read it as May/Ray. I don't think the leathan le leathan thing was a thing in old Irish. I didn't realise

I quite like the Éabhaoin spelling suggested above though. And if you wanted to, u could go with little Eve and Éabhaín, though I'd say that slightly differently, because I wouldn't say Éabha as a straightforward Ava, I'd nearly make three syllables of it.

Funny enough I looked at the old Aibfind and Aebfinn spellings (I might have those the wrong way round) and I wonder if they were said 'ay' long ago. Need an old Irish scholar I suppose. Then there's Aidan.

If we reach consensus on this, we should put it up as a pinned tweet on this board

@IsFuzzyBeagMise

If we reach consensus on this, we should put it up as a pinned tweet on this board

@Apileofballyhoo, ah, shur now

So it's an established name with an established spelling but you've decided that they are all wrong and everyone who has ever used this name with any alternative spelling is also wrong.
Why give your child a name which no one will be able to spell. You can't even spell it!

Yes @spookycookies Aoibheann pronounced Even is an established name with an established spelling. The people pronouncing it Ayveen, however numerous, are pronouncing it incorrectly.

I think there are other words where aoi is pronounced ay, and for the same reason, that it was two separate words.

When this thread started, I thought the ay was just like the sound John Gráinne made us practise at Coláiste Bhríde in Rannafast. You can hear it on teanglann.ie if you look up aoí, aoibh, aois. It's a subtle difference in the Ulster dialect to the Munster dialect. But it's too subtle to explain the "Ay-veen" pronunciation.

There are a few other names like this, where the accepted spelling of the name as at odds with much-loved pronunciations. Sorcha and Róisín spring to mind - let's not discuss them here though.

Ultimately, I think "Aoibhinn" is the best spelling for the pronunciation you want, OP. As @Apileofballyhoo says, Éabha is a different name. In Ulster the bh would sound like w. The initial slender vowel affects the sound of touching consonants too.

It would be great if there was a really detailed definitive Irish name dictionary, wouldn't it?

@FolkSongSweet

Yes *@spookycookies* Aoibheann pronounced Even is an established name with an established spelling. The people pronouncing it Ayveen, however numerous, are pronouncing it incorrectly.

Though if you look at the old Irish spellings I wonder if they have a point. My knowledge of old Irish wouldn't fill a postage stamp though. The only one I remember is Étaín or sometimes Édaín, modern Irish Aedín or Éadaoin/Éataoin. I've heard the latter pronounced Ay-ton to rhyme with gone - that did make me wonder what kind of a name it was till I saw the spelling.

The spelling most used for the name is Aoibheann, which originates from Old Irish "oíbind"
I know very little about Old Irish SeanChailleach, but looking up the oí sound of Old Irish gets you the vowel sound in void (just to add to the confusion)

Aobh, as part of a word (eg taobh, craobh) is pronounced ay-uv in modern Munster Irish, but not in the other dialects afaik. (I'm saying ay to rhyme with the English word hay btw.) Adding the i to get aoibh makes a big difference though and changes the sound completely to something a bit more like ee - at least in modern Irish.
So was Aobh or it's equivalent (ay-uv) the start of the name at some point in history? I don't know. It's not now anyway.

If we reach consensus on this, we should put it up as a pinned tweet on this board.
You're right IsFuzzyBeagMise
Sorry OP, I don't know if we're much help to you!

So was Aobh or it's equivalent (ay-uv) the start of the name at some point in history? I don't know. It's not now anyway.

Sorry, I mean from the point of view of the name's spelling here obviously! I'm even confusing myself now

I love your theory btw SeanChailleach - you could well be right. The fact that there's an old Irish name Éibhleann with much the same meaning an Aoibheann is interesting and adds support, I think.

One thing I'd be wary of though is that, because of our history, in many places the use of Irish names died out for many years. There has been a recent resurrgence in their use. So that makes it a bit more likely that the recent pronunciation of Aoibheann as Ay-veen is an error, rather than a very old pronunciation remembered and passed down the generations. Maybe?