I live in an area with a lot of Irish Americans, and I've seen this type of thing so much. We have more kids in this area with Irish names pronounced phonetically. I'm fine with people giving ethnic names (my brothers and I are the only ones on my father's side with "American" names), but it seems if you're going to pay respect to heritage with the name you ought to pay respect to the heritage with the pronunciation.

And then there's the flip side that the names will probably be pronounced incorrectly. I have a friend from Co. Galway and her son's name is Jarlath, and it still gets pronounced incorrectly (um, how hard is that one?)

This is definitely needed, Redwolf!

I don't really get this trend for giving English-speaking children Irish names in Irish orthography. Our ancestors used anglicised versions of their names for a reason. "Kathleen" is written that way because that's how Caitlín sounds to English-speakers. You can try to claim that was an imposition and not what the bearers themselves would've preferred, but that argument loses all validity when you proceed to mangle the name in precisely the same manner as any ignorant English monolingual would.

I use a different form of my given name in Irish than I do in English, and this isn't strange to me. In Chinese and Korean, my entire name is completely different! It's just easier for everyone that way--you should see the relief on the faces of Chinese-speakers when they realise they're only expected to address me with an ordinary Chinese surname and not the three-syllable consonant-heavy monstrosity in my passport.

depends, in the north it's more like Catch-leen

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Ó an Tuaisceart, cad le déanamh leis? "Seán" a deir an cuid is mó d'Éirinn, ach iadsan, ní folair dóibh "Séan" a leogaint astu!

Even very simple names can get mangled. My daughter goes by "Anna," with a fairly standard American pronunciation (first syllable rhymes with "pan") which you'd think would be pretty straightforward, but people seeing it for the first time often pronounce it AH-huh, which drives her bonkers.

My given name is Audrey, and when I was growing up, I'd tell people my name and they'd say things like "Oh, do you mean 'Andrea'?" I even had trouble once with an airline ticket that was issued to "André Nickel"! Then there was the acquaintance who insisted on pronouncing the final syllable as "ray" rather than "ree," no matter how many times I corrected him!

Redwolf

Traditional names are an important part of our heritage. If it's in Irish it should be spelled correctly and pronounced correctly.

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It is recommended that you always wait for three to agree on a translation.
I speak Connemara Irish, and my input will often reflect that.
I will do an mp3 file on request for short translations.
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The thing is, though, you're never going to convince parents that naming their kid something "different" is less than "cool"...and ethnic names definitely get the "cool" factor here, whether the parents bestowing the name know how to pronounce it or not. People see a name in a book and think it looks beautiful and exotic, put an English pronunciation on it and call it a day (a thing that often surprises me is how few people out there realize that different languages use different phonetic systems).

You'd be surprised, for example, at how few Americans know that "Caitlín" is the name from which Kathleen is derived. At some point, someone saw the name printed, pronounce it as if it were English (Kate lynn), gave her baby that spelling and that pronunciation, and started a trend.

Redwolf

I didn't know either -- I don't pronounce Kathleen and Caitlín in the same way at all
kʰæθlin vs katʲlʲinʲ

Why is there a th in English while that sound doesn't even exist in Irish? slender t isn't [θ] in any dialect...

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It's funny what the human ear can do. My mother's family name started out life as "Strang," but morphed into "Strength" in Alabama. We're still not sure where THAT "th" came from!

Re Caitlín, my guess is it went through a morph as something resembling an English "t" before softening into the "th" (especially given that, in some parts of Ireland, English speakers pronounce "th" as "t").

Redwolf

I understand that a broad t can be interpreted as th by English speakers, but slender t doesn't sound like an English th at all

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