How to correctly say “Samhain”
I see a lot of people saying this incorrectly, and as a person who speaks fluent Irish-Gaelic (my first language) and grew up in Ireland, I figured I’d clear this up.
Samhain is pronounced shahv-nah.
(if you want to be traditional, havh-nah if you’re female.)
Not sow-win
Not sam-hayne
Let me explain:
The “Sam-hane” pronunciation comes from people just saying the word, and sow-win comes from a man who didn’t even speak Irish by the name of Gerald Gardiner, and while he was a Wiccan, his pronunciation of Samhain was entirely incorrect, there is no “V” in the Gaelic language, so “mh” is pronounced as “V”. Feel free to ask me questions on this, I’ll be glad to answer them.
So with that…
Happy Samhain everyone!
(╯°□°）╯︵ uᴉɐɥɯɐs
@gaeilgeoirí is this true and if yes, how does the ‘nah’ happen?? I know ‘mh’ is sometimes pronounced like a ‘v’ but doesn’t it depend, and isn’t it sometimes pronounced as a ‘w’? Every Irish teacher I’ve ever had taught me to say sow-win, and I’m pretty sure that’s how the Gaeilgeoirí I know say it too? Is this a regional thing or??
like…….. i don’t ~actually~ speak irish but this seems…. really wrong
to the best of my knowledge ‘mh’ is only pronounced /v/ with slender vowels, a is a broad vowel so it’s pronounced /w/
and i don’t see how you can get a /ʃ/ in the beginning like even when ‘s’ is lenated it’s not pronounced like that
im not even going to try to parse how you get the second syllable to be ‘nah’
also has anyone who actually knows anything about irish called it “the gaelic language”?
aife @spindletrees if you want to confirm/deny?
This is a… Hot mess. What they might be referring to is the facand the harvest festival at the start of it among other things, is pronounced “sow-in”….. Oíche Shamhna, meaning Hallowe'en night, is pronounced ee-ha how-na. That’s because it’s the night of Samhain. it’s in the genitive. (Apologies for the shoddy pronunciation guide, I’m on mobile and the IPA has never been a friend of mine) Additionally, the v/w thing is sometimes a matter of dialect and sometimes a matter of the surrounding letters. Here is a link to a page about this stuff from a pretty reliable Irish-learning website: http://www.bitesize.irish/blog/oiche-shamhna-halloween-2/
Oíche Shamhna sona daoibh✨
Yeah, this is all really weird.
OP is right that ‘sam-hayne’ is not the correct pronunciation, but that’s really the only thing they presented correctly.
The claim that Gerald Garnder made up the ponunciation ‘sow-win’ is mistaken; sow-win is a perfectly fine English pronunciation of the Irish word which is, depending on dialect, anywhere from sah-win to sown. Here are some people with different dialects pronouncing the word in Irish. The comments about how there’s no ‘V’ in Irish are a non-sequitur, as there isn’t a ‘V’ in that word at all.
Like spindletrees said, Samhna is the genitive form, which in Irish you can’t use without having another noun in front of it. It would be pronounced something like “sowna”, as in the phrase Mí na Samhna. It’s not pronounced with an initial ‘sh’. The statement that ‘if you’re being traditional’ you pronounce it with an initial ‘h’ if you’re female is really bizarre - lenition is a fairly basic part of Irish grammar, and always mandatory not something that you can casually use or not use depending on how traditional you want to be. Lenition also has nothing to do with the speaker’s gender, and everything to do with the gender of the noun which comes before a noun in the genitive - so in Oíche Shamhna, the ‘s’ goes to an ‘h’ sound because oíche (night) is a feminine noun, regardless of my own gender.
As for the pronunciation of mh/bh, in most dialects they are pronounced something like an English ‘w’ if they’re broad (i.e. they come after or before an a,o, or u), and otherwise like a ‘v’ (the exception is Munster dialects, where it’s usually always a ‘v’). At the end, or in the middle of words, there’s a strong tendency to ‘weaken’ the broad mh/bh, and just ‘strengthen’ the vowel sound which comes before it by making it a diphthong.
