# Gaeilge (Irish) : the v sound of mh in  Niamh



## jacdac

By now he was rich as Croesus, and had recently made another packet, probably out of someone like Eddie Race or Raymond Leonard. And he’d found Ava. He was planning a new venture, and he wouldn’t be alone. *Niamh* sighed.
source: trick of the night by Joy Ellis

are there other Irish words or names with the spelling mh and sounding v, or is Niamh the exception?

Thank you.


----------



## Wordy McWordface

There are others. For example,
Caoimhín​with a 'v' sound in the middle is the Irish spelling of the now common name 'Kevin'.

There are also several names where 'bh' is pronounced as 'v', for example _Siobhan_ and _Meabh_.


----------



## Chasint

I'll point out that the Irish language has very little in common with English, and most English speakers have no knowledge of how to pronounce it.

English has maybe 10 words from Irish that a native of England would recognise.


----------



## cidertree

In Gaeilge, the name is written with a fada on the 'i' - Níamh.


----------



## natkretep

Have a look at some listings of Irish Gaelic names, like: Traditional Irish Names in Gaelic
You'll see things like *Álmhath *for Alva.

Scots Gaelic names also bear some similarities to Irish Gaelic ones; see List of Scottish Gaelic given names - Wikipedia
You'll see things like *Iomhar *for Ivor.


----------



## marquess

I remember an old Scotsman telling me the chainstore 'Menzies' should be pronounced something like 'Mingus' - would this derive from Scots Gaelic?


----------



## natkretep

marquess said:


> I remember an old Scotsman telling me the chainstore 'Menzies' should be pronounced something like 'Mingus' - would this derive from Scots Gaelic?


That's more to do with the way it was written in Scots (rather than Scots Gaelic). See Menzies - Wikipedia


----------



## pimlicodude

cidertree said:


> In Gaeilge, the name is written with a fada on the 'i' - Níamh.


No it isn't. Or it might have been occasionally in 16th century manuscripts, but in modern Irish it has no "fada". The name means "brightness, lustre", and is in the main modern Irish dictionary under niamh at teanglann (dot) ie. 

mh and bh are both /v/ in Irish. But it does depend on the word and the position in the word. Eg. amhras, "doubt" is /aurəs/, where the erstwhile /v/ is vocalised. There are complex rules as to when bh and mh are vocalised. Abhras, "yarn", is also /aurəs/. In the old days, amhras might have had a degree of nasalisation, thus differentiating it from abhras, but in most people's Irish, the two are identical.


----------



## cidertree

pimlicodude said:


> No it isn't. Or it might have been occasionally in 16th century manuscripts, but in modern Irish it has no "fada"




Yes, it is. You've obviously confused the name with the adjective, and verb - which don't have a fada.


Google Search - Níamh site:irishtimes.com


----------



## pimlicodude

cidertree said:


> Yes, it is. You've obviously confused the name with the adjective, and verb - which don't have a fada.
> 
> 
> Google Search - Níamh site:irishtimes.com


Searching the Irish times for Níamh with a lengthmark, i.e. the link you just gave, produces 243 hits. Searching it for Niamh without a lengthmark produces 95,500 hits. The name Niamh is a use of the noun as a name. It is not pronounced differently and not spelt differently in correct Irish. 

That does not mean that individual Irish people don't write their names as they wish, as indeed they are entitled to please themselves in that regard. The Irish Taoiseach writes his name Micheál, with no fada on the i, although the name is generally written Mícheál. I have a theory that this is because pre-tonic long vowels are reduced in Munster (the southern province). Whereas other dialects have the stress on the first syllable, in Munster the stress is on the second in this word, and so he might wish to indicate a shorter vowel in the first syllable. Of course, people can do this with their names if they wish. 

Another thing you can do is to search the comhar dot ie site. Comhar is a well-produced monthly magazine in Irish, to which I subscribe, and of course shows Niamh with no síneadh fada (lengthmark).


----------



## cidertree

pimlicodude said:


> Searching it for Niamh without a lengthmark produces 95,500 hits.


Well done. Did you happen to spot the fact that the surnames seem to be anglicised versions, or of foreign origin? - based on a quick page hop through the results.

I could mention that Martin is the anglicised version of Ó Máirtín, counter with Míchéal Ó Coileáin - also from Cork - or waste time finding more examples, but I'm not all that invested in this, so we'll leave it there.


----------



## Awwal12

cidertree said:


> Did you happen to spot the fact that the surnames seem to be anglicised versions, or of foreign origin? - based on a quick page hop through the results.


There's a simple way to address that issue - you can just search for the name together with some uniquely Irish frequent word (to rule out most texts written in other languages).
"Níamh" +"bhíodh" - 15 results, in many of which, to my surprise, "níamh" doesn't even seem to be a name (judging on the lack of capitalization in the word which is otherwise present in the texts - sadly, my knowledge of Irish is pretty much non-existent);
"Niamh" +"bhíodh" - 109 results.


----------



## pimlicodude

Awwal12 said:


> There's a simple way to address that issue - you can just search for the name together with some uniquely Irish frequent word (to rule out most texts written in other languages).
> "Níamh" +"bhíodh" - 15 results, in many of which, to my surprise, "níamh" doesn't even seem to be a name (judging on the lack of capitalization in the word which is otherwise present in the texts - sadly, my knowledge of Irish is pretty much non-existent);
> "Niamh" +"bhíodh" - 109 results.


Well, around 40% of Irish people tell the census they are native speakers of Irish. The real number is closer to 1%. The same thing is seen in the ex-Soviet space, where the numbers of people who tell the census they are native speakers of Ukrainian, Belarusian, Latvian, etc is way in excess of the number of people who actually speak those languages on a daily basis or even speak those languages well. 

ía is a combination not found in (modern) Irish. There is a corpus of contemporary Irish at gaois (dot) ie - the name Niamh occurs 846 times in well-produced Irish-language texts in the corpus, never with a síneadh fada. It would be a considerable error to put an accent on such a word (although this does not mean that English-speaking Irish people have to spell their own names in any particular way; of course they don't). 

But this moves away from the topic of how to pronounced mh. Lenition means a softening of articulation (e.g. p /p/ becomes ph /f/ - the plosive becomes a fricative). The Irish mh is a lenited m. It was originally a nasalised bilabial fricative. But in most parts of Ireland it has been replaced by a non-nasalised labiodental fricative (which bh is also).


----------



## Tegs

pimlicodude said:


> mh and bh are both /v/ in Irish. But it does depend on the word and the position in the word.


It can also depend on the dialect. I would say Niaw for Niamh, and Siobhán is pronounced Shiwan in some places, quite different to the more commonly-known pronunciation Shivon (apologies for my lack of knowledge of the IPA). 


cidertree said:


> In Gaeilge, the name is written with a fada on the 'i' - Níamh.


That's not the case, I'm afraid. In both books of Irish names I've got where this name is mentioned - Gaelic Personal Names by Donnchadh Ó Corráin and Fidelma Maguire, and A-Z of Irish Names for Children by Diarmaid Ó Muirithe - it is given as Niamh. The only other spelling given is the older version, Niam. I'd never come across the spelling Níamh until this thread.

There are, I now know, people who spell it with í, as you've found online, but then people spell it all sorts of ways, including Neave and Neeve. I've seen people put random accent marks on names to make them look more Irish but it just comes across as a bit odd when you know that's not the normal spelling. And presumably the person who spells it this way is obliged to forever tell others how to spell it. 

Getting back on topic, there are plenty of other Irish names with a v sound in them too, as others have said. It is a shame that outside of Ireland the spelling of Irish names causes such pronunciation stress to people.


----------

