There's probably a word I've been pronouncing wrong my whole life that I don't know about
Just based on how often I notice someone mispronounce a word without realizing it (or have done so myself and realized it later). Statistically I'm probably still doing it with some word.
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Welcome to the world of Irish names!
We got:
And many more!
Hope do you pronounce Siobhan?
Shuh-vawn
My American accent pronounces it "Shove-on".
There’s meant to be a fada over the a (á), so it’s definitely meant to be a longer vowel sound.
Take the name Sean for example. Spelled like that it’s actually pronounced shan, and means old. The name that we all pronounce as Shawn is actually spelled Seán
And, fun fact, is the Irish version of the Hebrew name Yohanan (יוֹחָנָן) from which we get John and Jean and Jehan and Johan and Shane and Juan and many other variants!
Everybody's named John. All the way back. There is only one name, just lots of different spellings and pronunciations.
It actually helps a little if you realize the Russian letter В is pronounced like an English V.
We should re-do Romanization. Start over, sound it out, have a big Anglosphere conference to decide on what letters make what noise and stick to it.
Many of the slavic romanizations have largely centralised on strict roman phonetics. There are still exceptions, but many of them can be sounded out with a bit of learning.
Yeah. English doesn't use the "bh" and "dh" digraphs the same way we use "th", but Irish does. One you learn that, that's like 80-90% of the confusion.
My Irish cousin-in-law recently had a daughter and named her Blathnaid. I was very surprised to learn it is pronounced Bla-nid