Niamh?

[jenster1976]

I love this, and would also shorten it to Evie, but 2 concerns, is it making life difficult for my LO on the spelling front (although DD1 is Isabella and people seem to have plenty of problems with that ) and secondly does it seem pretentious when you're not properly Irish - although it goes v well with our v irish surname?

My niece is called niamh and i love it, not many about and really pretty, no name teasing to come from it!!! her middle name is kate seems to go well.

I love the name Niamh - it would be my first choice for a girls name except that DPs surname is Smith and I'm really not sure the 2 names work together. It sounds a bit abrupt having 2 short names like that (am I right?). I'm adding my vote to the 'Niamh' spelling too, I really dislike seeing it as Neeve for some reason.

My little boy goes to school with a Nieve, and i am so glad they spelt it that was or else i would never remember how to spell it!

They are teaching kids to read phonetically these days, Niamh would get very confused... I am going to have to change my DS from Isaac to 'ie s a k'

I joined this thing solely to comment on this thread!
I'm only 17 and I used to really hate my name at first but now I love it, it's nice to be different and I think changing the spelling is pretty ridiculous, it ruins the effect of the name.
As for teachers saying it wrong etc, you get used to it and it's generally funny to be called nymph! haha.

My younger sister's named Roisin and she always has it much worse than me with pronunciation anyway.

My experience was the same as mynameisniamh's. It is good to have a distinctive name: my name isn't Niamh, but my clue line used to be 'like the one from Bananarama' which worked reasonably well in the late 80's and early 90s.

When I first moved to Ireland, I stuck to my habit of introducing myself over the phone just by my first name and sounded like a v. self-important twit as lots of women my age share my name here.

I'd stick to the Irish spelling myself. A little bit of spelling out loud is a small price to pay for being different as niamhyy says.

We have a short (irish) surname Idreamofbeanie, and my DD1 is Maebh, which works because of the long vowel perhaps ... She was known as 'bean' before she was born too. Her name has a number of variant spellings in Irish, and as we were living in England when she was born we went for the one which had the biggest clue at the beginning.

Caoimhe and Aoife are lovely names too.

When

I know 3. 1 uses Niamh (her Dad is Irish), the other 2 use Neve. As Niamh is quite popular most English people know how to pronounce and I think it is much nicer to use the native spelling than an anglicized form.

I love the name Naimh but our surname is O'Brien so her initials would be NOB. Does anyone think this makes the name a no no????? When I was pregnant with my son I kept telling my husband we couldn't do it to our child to give them the initials NOB but the more I think about the name the more I love it. I know you don't have to write down your initials often and we could always put her initials as NO rather than NOB. I also liked the name Ryan but Ryan O'Brien rhymes too much so we settled on Callum which I also love.

I think that changing the original spelling of any name is such a shame (regardless of origin). The English language is full of words that are not spelt as they are pronounced and it seems like quite an American phenomenon to change the spelling for ease of pronunciation. Absolutely no offence is meant by my last comment I only feel this way because I?m so proud of my irish heritage that it seems a pity to dilute it.

xxx

there are now so many names that aren't 'said' like they're 'spelled' that you shouldn't need to anglicise it unless you want to. it's a lovely name and i would use it myself - although even being from and living in ireland, for personal reasons i would spell it Neve and enjoy it...how many times do we see names that are all spelled different ways and are the same name? Alastair, Alistair, Alasdair, Alasdhair...

but as one with a very irish difficult to spell and say name, remember she will probably have to correct people all her life (sometimes this gets a bit tiresome).