Unusual old names in Ireland from 1920s

[Weligama]

Thinking of old family and friends names from this era not always Gaelic in origin - possibly church related - my list includes the following - anyone else have any other suggestions:

Malachy,
Jarlath,
Cornelius
Aloysius
Jeremiah

Can’t recall many unusual female names except maybe Philomena, Immaculata, Attracta,

see also Aodh, Sadhbh . . . my heart bleeds for them

bleeds for them the non Irish English speakers, not them the Aodhs and Sadhbhs, though I have no doubt they find some of the boggling foreigners irritating

Is Furzey an actual name then?? I know one from my home place but I always thought it was some kind of odd unexplained nickname...?

Going back a few years, my parents had a cottage in West Cork where there was a lot of overlap of names so you used the fathers name, and if necessary the grandfather's name. We knew a Tim-Pat-Joe. Cornelius was very common. My school friend from Limerick (English convent boarding school) had Thady or rather Thaddeus, as a regular name in her family. It went to the eldest son and alternated with John between the generations.

Yes, he was an early 7th century saint, originally from Connacht, who later worked as a missionary to East Anglia and Gaul.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Fursey

Love Tim-Pat-Joe.

I might call a couple of kittens Pegeen-Mike and Johnnypateenmike.

We had a nun called that, everyone called her Pepe (like the jeans)

Yes, but it’s spelt Fursey usually. There are a few churches and schools and GAA clubs named after the saint in various places around the country.
I’d say it must be unusual as a first name though.

No zzs in Irish, of course, my bad.

No y’s either though, so Fursey mustn’t have been the original name. He’s also known as St Fursa I know, I think that’s probably the Irish form of the name.

The use of 'h' as a non-letter in modern Irish has a lot to answer for!

Once you explain that it is not a letter, it is used to indicated the softening of the preceding consonant, the fog starts clearing and things make a bit more sense.

The 'séimhiú', the softening of the consonant, used to be indicated with a dot above it in the old Cló Gaelach, the typeface used for writing Irish up to the 1950s/60s.

However that was difficult for typing and printing - Irish language typewriters used to have the séimhiú dot on a 'dead key', i.e. one that did not move the carriage along, so you typed the dot, and then the letter in the same place.

So when they abandoned the Cló Gaelach, they modernised the typeface Irish is written in, and used a 'h' after the consonant instead of the dot. (It wasn't a completely new idea, it had been used in some old manuscripts).

The irony is that if they had held on to the séimhiú for a while longer, computer printers would have happily formed any letter of any shape + any diacritics your heart desired, and there wouldn't have been any need for the confusing lettter-H-which-is-not-actually-a-letter🙄

Thanks for that, the Fursey I knew was indeed in connacht.
ETA Nothing else in the vicinity named for him tho

@MarieDeGournay

There’s precedent for that sort of thing in Irish though. Some of the vowels present in words are there only to indicate the pronunciation of the adjacent consonant, and are not meant to be pronounced themselves.

You mean like the caol-le-caol etc thing? Good point.

Apart from that, though- on the whole if you pronounce - even fleetingly - every vowel in an Irish word, it sounds right.
So Gael is gah-ayl not gale, and said quickly sounds a bit like gwale.
And Coimisiún na Meán is the commission for the media, not women -
I keep hearing it pronounced as if it was Coimisiún na mBan

My 'pronounce every vowel, however fleetingly' suggestion would mean Meán would be pronounced Me-awn, which said quickly sounds like me-yawn, which to the best of my knowledge is the correct pronunciation of the word 'meán'.

I have actually tried this out with English friends - once I had explained away the 'h', explained what the consonants should sound like, and told them to speak every vowel, they sight-read a bit of Irish text and it sounded not bad at all

I didn't even know he actually existed until I met a man whose uncle knew him. This elderly man said his uncle told him Thady would occasionally stay in their house . As wiki says he had no interest in football or hurling , though he was a good road bowler.
However he doesn't always seem to have been a poor labourer , at least according to this old man. He was a cattle drover , they often had large sums of money - their own and other peoples - in their possession. Bould Thady apparently slept with a loaded revolver when he was on the road.
No family gathering or party was complete without a rendition of that song btw!

I've been guilty of such mis pronunciation @MarieDeGournay . Not long ago I heard an Aran islander saying Inis Meán just as you have described it. Makes sense now I see it.

@MarieDeGournay 'pronounce every vowel, however fleetingly'

But not always - Siobhan follows the lettering of Giovanni/, (presumably because it's a medieval late-comer to the Irish name-list and from the Latin) and the 'sio' sound is much the same as it is in (eg) vision. Which makes the near-hysteria from Americans and (some) English people when confronted with it rather irritating.

otoh, don't even get me started on RTÉ presenters refusal to pronounce Eowyn correctly - did NONE of them watch the Lord of the Rings?

huff puff, Eeeeeee-owen.

FFS

Foreign dipthongs be complicated not impossible, and words derived from Old English are not unknown here.

@MarieDeGournay
My understanding is that some vowels aren’t meant to be pronounced, they just signal whether the adjacent consonant is slender or broad. In Irish all consonants (except h of course) come in pairs, so there are two pronunciations of each, broad or slender. You need a vowel to tell you which is which and sometimes that’s the only function of a particular vowel. In the word buí, for example, u simply signals that the b is pronounced as a broad b. The í is pronounced but not u. The vowels that serve this sort of function are called sleamhnóga.

Sometimes vowel pairs are pronounced as one vowel sound too. For example, eo is the same as ó. The only difference between beo and bó is the quality of the b, slender in the former vs broad in the latter. The e in beo just signals this, it’s not pronounced as such.

Very much open to correction though, my Irish really isn’t great 🫣

Thanks @Abhannmor, very interesting.
My mother used sing the song around the house, it was very well known where she grew up. There’s a bit more about him in this link. He was a Timothy apparently.
https://www.dib.ie/biography/quill-timothy-thady-a7546
Love the way he’s celebrated as a ‘therapeutic lover’😁 How bad!

Your explanation sounds good @Dontpresstoohard . I used to get confused because they speak of Broad or Slender consonants in the text books. Whereas it's the vowel either side that indicates it. The slender D is very rigidly adhered to in Ulster . Less so in Connacht , Munster. In my sons aural Irish exam he did ok on the latter dialects but on Ulster he was flummoxed by a word he'd never heard before which sounded Arabic , like Hajj. So he got a copy of the text afterwards . The offending word was Cuid. I spent a week in Glencolmcille and got used to it.
But a kid doing the Leaving cert has no hope !

Yes, I know a couple of absolutely fluent Irish speakers who still have some difficulty with words/phrases from other dialects (particularly Ulster as they’re from Munster). As you say it’s really difficult for students. I think if they became proficient in one dialect they’d be doing very well indeed! Sure, expose them to the other dialects in the classroom and make them aware of the variations — that’s important — but it’s not fair to examine them on it in Leaving Cert aurals imho.

Slender d is very different between Ulster and Munster all right, slender t too.

Both my grannies and my mother's name was/is Mary, it's my second name, my first name is Greek/French. None of my 8 siblings have an Irish name, most named after the royals.

My mother only had one brother who died when he was a day old, he was named Patrick.

My mother's paternal aunts were Bridget/Bridie, Mary Ellen, Isabella, Emely and Nancy, her Dad was Thomas, her uncle was Joseph. I'll have to check with my siblings what her maternal aunts and uncles were named.

My Dad was Michael, known by friends as Mickie,
his siblings were Thomas known as Tommy, Martin known as Mattie, Redmond known as Remie, Mary Kate, Anne, Mary Margaret. The last four named there died as young babies.

Redmond is a nice name. Redmond O Hanlon was a well known highwayman. It seems to pop up in northern families?

Redmond Prendiville was our Archbishop for many years. He was a Kerryman.

A quick look at 1911 suggests it was all over the country but slightly more numerous in Galway.