Talk:Caílte mac Rónáin

Pronunciation

It would help at this (and other such) articles to have a pronunciation guide. This given name seems to vary between /kweel-teh/ and /kyle-chuh/, depending on specific modern Hiberno-English dialect, with some intermediate forms, like /keel-chuh/ (the one I would have expected, at least for the Caoilte spelling, and perhaps /kyle-chuh/ for the Caílte spelling, from the Irish class I took once upon a time). Some source somewhere probably has an idea how it was pronounced in Old Irish. The family name seem to even out toward "Roh-nine", though I've also heard something approximating "Roh-nawin", and what I've been taught would lean toward that because of the accent on the á). Does WP:IRELAND have any kind of consistent approach to this sort of thing? Giving one exact pronunciation seems dicey, but giving three or more for each spelling would be overkill. Is it reasonable to provide a traditional Gaeltacht, vs Dublin standardized school-book, pronunciation?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:55, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

I've commented on general principles at the WikiProject Ireland talk page, but I'll make a couple of specific points here. First, there's no such thing as a traditional Gaeltacht pronunciation: there are several Gaeltacht areas, each with its own pronunciation, and no one has precedence over another. Second, Irish pronunciation cannot always be reproduced as English pronunciation. "Caoilte" is pronounced neither as /keel-chuh/ or as /kweel-chuh/, but somewhere in between ("Caílte" would be pronounced the same way; it's only the spelling that has changed). The same holds for "Roh-nawin"/"Roh-nine". Is there any point in debating which is the more correct when neither is correct? Scolaire (talk) 23:33, 23 August 2015 (UTC)