Gaelic Spelling and Pronunciation

Question

What is the Irish language equivalent of the name Aidan/Aiden? I know that the name is derived from the Irish language. Perhaps a more difficult question: What is... or would be the Scottish Gaelic spelling and pronunciation of the same name.

Wikipedia says Aodhán in Irish and Aodhàn in Scottish Gaelic (note the accents are different).

all over the Internet there seems to be confusion with the correct pronunciation of Aodhán in Irish... specifically whether there is a "D" like sound when said or there is no "D" and it is in fact pronounced much like Ian. fyi: I know the Irish spelling of Ian is not Aodhán

I could find now Scottish Gaelic info on...well almost everything. I'm curious where this Wikipedia editor got that info and whether it's correct.

Also, a simple one... Cearbhaill is my surname though I use Carroll a lot. My family says KYEARLL... ll as in the -OL in Carol. Would you agree?

Answer 1

Firstly, I'll assume that the way your first and last names are written reflect the official written standard, the Caighdeán Oifigiúil. This amounts to a single way of writing Gaeilge (Irish) even though it has numerous dialects with quite varied pronunciations.

In this system the 'dh' in Aodhán would normally represent a voiced velar fricative (being in a 'broad' context) but I've heard pronunciations that have it as [j] or even elide it altogether. Stress is on the vowel with fada (the accent mark) and that vowel should sound like the one in 'born'. The 'Ao' has a variety of pronunciations, from [i:] to [ei] (and others). You could try something like:

Aodhán: [iˈɣɔ:n], [ˈeiˈɣɔ:n] or [iˈjɔ:n], [eiˈjɔ:n]

As for your surname, it depends on how precise you want to be:

Cearbhaill: [ˈcʲaɾəwɑlʲ] or [ˈcʲaɾəvɑlʲ]

The bh can represent either [w] or [v]; note that a brief schwa-like vowel is typically inserted between consonants such as the rbh cluster. If the pronunciation with [w] is preferred in this name then it's not surprising that it would (at speed) surface as how you represent it, i.e. 'KYEARLL... ll as in the -OL in Carol' — nice to see your family has retained the 'slender' (i.e. palatalised) initial consonant!

It's likely the case that the majority of speakers of Irish nowadays are those who have learned Standard Irish as a second language. One result of this is that there are many who don't fully acquire aspects such as the velar fricatives and some of the broad/slender variants, as they are found in the unbroken Irish speech lineages. As a result it's not unusual to hear the voiced velar fricative produced as a [g] as this is probably the nearest English equivalent. So you might hear people pronounce your first name as [iˈgɔ:n] or [ˈeiˈgɔ:n].

Answer 2

The most common pronunciation would be something along the lines of /e:ɔd̪ˠa:n̪ˠ/ amongst all the Irish speakers I've ever heard or spoken with "as Gaeilge", both Gaelgóirí and second language speakers. I don't know why the séimhiú (lenition) on the letter d is ignored in pronunciation, but I can't recall ever having heard it spoken. I tried to find an example recording but the online dictionaries failed me as they don't usually cover names. The best I found was this video from TG4 of Paisean Faisean which has a lad named Aodhán on it. His name is spoken several times after 1:28.

https://youtu.be/6vID2PFOcDY?t=1m28s

Answer 3

The spelling Aodhán reflects the Classical Irish pronunciation of:

[e:ðˠɑ:nˠ]

This evolved into:

[i:ɑ:nˠ]

in northern dialects and

[e:gˠɑ:nˠ]

in southern dialects.

In Classical Irish the digraph "dh" conveyed [ð], however this sound was lost in everyday speech by the 14th century (although still taught to Bards in their seven year training so they could preserve the meter of older poems). In the vast majority of cases "dh" merged with "gh", that is [ð] was replaced with [ɣ].

There were some words however where this was not the case, such as Aodhán, Cródha and Díoghras.