I need help pronouncing three names in Irish Gaelic. I keep getting conflicting advice so I thought I’d best ask here.
They are
Etain is this AY-deen? (wasn’t allowed to use Etaoin)
Eithne ETH-neh or EN-yeh?
**Dealgnaid ** (I’m told the modern spelling is Dalny but I’m wondering about the -aid.)
thanks for your help!
Can you qualify your request a bit? There are differences in how you’d pronounce these depending on dialect and time period. All of these names are from medieval Irish mythological literature, so I’m not sure if you want Old Irish or Modern Irish Gaelic. For example B, “ETHnyeh” (approximately) would be the Old Irish, “EN-yeh” the modern, because the sound of “TH” has gone from th-as-in-thin to h-as-in-hot, which gets lost before an [n]. Similarly, in the third example, the final -id has gone from “idh” (dh like th in this) to “ee.”
Sorry, I should have been more clear.
I’d like the Old Irish pronunciation to go with the Old Irish spelling. (And feel free to correct my spelling if you’d like. I’ve seen so many variation it’s hard to know what’s what.)
For background, these three names are names I’d like to use in the Lord of the Rings Online game. I’ll spare you the long and boring reasons why. I picked these three names hoping they’d blend in at least somewhat.
Étaín Roughly AY-deen, ay as in day and deen as in piña colada (that is, slightly palatalized). The AY should be a pure vowel as in Spanish or Italian without the little [y] as in English.
Eithne AYTH-nyeh, though I don’t think anyone would criticize you for saying ETH-nyeh. The vowel is somewhere in between.
**Dealgnaid ** The Old Irish dictionary, with its somewhat irregularly regularized spelling, lists her as Delgnat, but they also list the adjective delgnaid ‘distinguished,’ which I’m pretty sure is the same word, and other sources give the spelling you have here. In any case, the first syllable is something like dyellug (like British people say “due” as opposed to “do”). The is just a schwa, and Irish people don’t even count it as a syllable (which is why they don’t write it, either). The “nat” is naad, and “naid” is “naathe,” th as in then, so “DYELLugnaathe.”
thanks, Dr. Drake. Eithne’s even prettier than I thought it would be.
That aa sound you describe in naad and naathe - that like the a in paid?
No, long [a] as in father. The {i} isn’t a real vowel here, it just indicates a palatal quality to the final consonant, although by modern Irish it has become real and even lengthened. Like Pinocchio on steroids. Irish pronunciation is very odd.
If you want a better guide, I cannot recommend David Stifter’s recent book Sengoidelc highly enough. It is the single best source for understanding the relationship between letters and sounds in Old Irish.
You’re telling me! Thanks for the info & the book suggestion. I’ll check it out.
Tolkien’s* Letters* is not at hand, so I don’t have the exact quotation. But JRRT said that he couldn’t make anything of Old Irish. And he also had problems with Modern Irish.
He liked Ireland & visited often. But his problems with the language comfort the egos of mere mortals.
My sister-in-law Eithne is an Irish-speaker from Connemara, and she says it “ETH-nuh”.
Not odd per se, but for a native English speaker, trying to guess the pronounciation of an Irish word from its written form is quite tricky 
My Mum and her Mum are both called Eithne which we pronounce eth-nah or eth-nuh (with a softer second syllable)
As an aside, how would my sister’s name “Dianiamh” be pronounced? We use a “dee” at the start, but some other Irish speakers use a “gee”.
We have a reasonable idea for Old Irish. Modern Irish pronunciation is so varied that each name has at least four wildly different answers.
The main trick about Irish is that, like Russian, it has both palatalized and non-palatalized consonants. Unlike Russian, which has a special, unpronounced letter ь to show palatal quality, Irish uses an [e] or an [ i] to show palatalization, and sometimes they’re pronounced as real vowels but sometimes they just show the quality of the consonant. Modern Irish is very good about showing this in writing; Old Irish not so great. “Dianiamh” has to be misspelled, because it gives me conflicting values for the [n]. “Dianaimh” shows a palatal [d] and a regular [n]. But which vowel? Dyeen or dyahn? I would have guessed the latter, but I looked it up and it turns out the name is dyeen-iv.
How strongly you palatalize the [d] is a matter of dialect. With most speakers you can’t really hear the [y] I’m writing, and it takes a while to train your ear and mouth to recognize the distinction. It’s even more difficult in unstressed syllables. Some dialects, however, palatalize it so strongly that it turns into a J. (Like d’you wanna? can sound like joo wanna?) Old Irish [dh] and [gh] have fallen together in modern Irish, though [d] and [g] have not, but it’s not uncommon to de-lenite [in this case, remove the h] to the wrong consonant.
The -imh shows that in old Irish, the consonant was a nasalized, palatalized bilabial fricative and was originally an [m]. Modern [mh] is either a V, a W, or silent, depending on the dialect and the surrounding vowels. It has fallen together with [bh] in most (but not all) dialects.
Interesting, I never realised there was such a difference. As it happens, I’ve never heard of another Díaniamh (and I must remember that fada over the first i!) so I’ve nothing to compare it to.
That’s what I, all the Eithnes I ever met and every Irish person I’ve ever heard say the word says as well 
Of course “AYTH-nyeh” probably sounds like “ETH-nuh” in an American accent 