Baby name trouble

[Lucky13]

Hi,
I maybe should have put this in the 'Am i being unreasonable section' because maybe i am!

I would love to give our child an irish first name as i'm half irish and have a large close knit irish family. In particular i'd like to name her after my aunt and i have loved this name since i was a young child.

My DH however wants an english name, saying that he is english and we don't live in Ireland. He also says that no-one will be able to pronounce it. I also know that his parents will also hate it as they are very traditional.

I've said if he really hates the name then i'll compromise to another irish name instead, and anglicise the spelling, but he still says no. The baby will have his surname, so why can't i have something reflecting my family?

I have an awful first name which i have hated throughout my life and i wanted to give our child a name which is uncommon and special. However i realise that i may be using my own unhappy experience to give the child an unusual name.

I just think that there is nothing wrong in being individual or wanting a little girl to feel her name is special. I hated the fact that my name was the same as so many others.

I have come up with lists of names and he doens't like any of them. He has come up with one which is really common at the mo and won't even look at name books! It's only a few weeks to go now and i don't want the baby to be called 'baby'!!

Does anyone have any ideas how i can get him to take interest in names or even to try to get to understand why this is important to me?

thanks

Skidoodle - I take it back then. I have only ever heard Caitlin pronounced Katelyn, so obviously not as straightforward as I thought

so is neala pronounced neela, narla or nayla? very confused now!!

I think I've got it.

I was trying to pronounce Neala in Irish, but if you just say it in English, it's fine.

This is my guess of where the name came from: (sorry, I'm a bit obsessed with this kind of thing)
There is an Irish male name Niall. This is usually pronounced Ny-all, but really that is an English pronunciation. The correct Irish language pronunciation is Nee-all. This is anglicised to Neil or... Neal, so my guess is that Neala is to Neal as Paula is to Paul.

So the name Neala (pronounced Neela) is probably an English language name from Ireland (as opposed to an Irish language name). It's also likely something somebody made up fairly recently, but possibly not. It's nice though

Now, this is where your discussion with DH comes in. If he objects to Irish names because they are hard to pronounce, he can't really have the same objection to names in English that are from Ireland can he?

Alanna is also in this group. The name comes from the Irish for addressing a child/baby "a leanbh", pronounced either "a laniv", "a lanu" or, "a lana". This form of address is very common in Ireland, even amongst non-Irish speakers (in fact, particularly amongst them). That's why you would have heard your Grandad use it. My Granny uses it to me. The name Alanna comes from that use of the word, and is not in Irish either, although it's definitely an Irish name in that it comes from Ireland and has it's roots in Irish.

Unfortunately this doesn't apply to Áine or Orla, but Orla is pronounced the same way in English and Irish and Áine is a family name and must get special consideration because of that.

Message ends. Sorry it was so long

btw how is eimear and eimhir pronounced?

Eimear - ee-mer - stress on first syllable
eimhir i'm not familiar with. Is it irish? Could be gaelic maybe? Anyway as written it would be said like the english word 'ever' in irish