As a native, I have to say that’s an impressive guide to pronunciation. I can’t really argue with any of it except that nobody would mind if you refer to the language as Gaelic.
When I was in school, Irish was taught in a very academic way: the focus was on reading and writing – as opposed to listening or speaking. As a result, most people of my generation don’t actually speak it and only understand a “cúpla focail”. We only learned how to pronounce the words in order to read them correctly (it was only after I left school that I learned that both spelling and the alphabet had been simplified in the mid-twentieth century).
Thankfully, in the decades since then, there’s a lot more emphasis on spoken and colloquial Irish. On Patrick’s Day, I attended a music festival where one stage was all young Irish musicians speaking and performing in Irish, with a lot of the audience understanding what they were saying.
If you have a spare 13 minutes, I’d recommend watching the charming short film, “Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom” about a Chinese man who learns Irish before coming to Ireland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqYtG9BNhfM
There are 3 dialects of Irish and a lot of names are pronounced quite differently depending on which dialect you are using. Sometimes one particular variant has caught on across the island and in other cases there are multiple variants in use. https://www.abair.ie/ga gives you an accurate pronunciation of any Irish word in all 3 dialects
My name (Owen Byrne) is not that difficult but I’ve spelt it so many times in my life it’s become a reflex. Then I visited Dublin for the first time in 30 years and found myself embarrassed by doing it.
If it's any consolation (and assuming you're not Irish), spelling it is helpful in Dublin too as we spell it different ways here. It could be eoghan, eóghain, owen etc.
So if you're making a reservation at a hotel, restaurant etc. then spelling it out won't do any harm.
My earliest introduction to ethnic Irish names was as a teen, a character in the comic book Preacher of Irish writer Garth Ennis: a hundred year old vampire from pre-Independence Ireland named Proinsias.
Since I’d never heard anyone pronounce a Gaelic word as a youngin, I thought it was pronounced “Proyn-she-uhs”. But I think I read somewhere its the Gaelic form of Pontius, as in Pontius Pilot, and is actually pronounced “Prawn-she-is’.
I haven’t read Preacher in around 20 years so I don’t remember that characater. Proinsias is actually the Irish version of “Francis”. The most famous modern-day example being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proinsias_De_Rossa
Your first stab at pronunciation wasn’t far off. You’d get away with “uhs” as the final syllable. I’d also say that the first “o” is pronounced similar to the first syllable in the English word, “onion” (as opposed to an “aw” sound).
I knew someone named Siobahn, they started while I was away from the office and I never met them in person, had no clue how to say the name and said it phonetically when I first met them....
The thing is, Gaelic is much more phonetic than English, it's just a different mapping of phonemes to letters.
(much of English is actually phonetic as well, except there's no marker for whether the word is using the Anglo-Saxon scheme, the Germanic one, the Nordic one, Greek, Latin, or some combination of those within a word e.g. "television". Or absolute nonsense like someone using the Greek scheme for Gaelic resulting in "ptarmigan")
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When I was in school, Irish was taught in a very academic way: the focus was on reading and writing – as opposed to listening or speaking. As a result, most people of my generation don’t actually speak it and only understand a “cúpla focail”. We only learned how to pronounce the words in order to read them correctly (it was only after I left school that I learned that both spelling and the alphabet had been simplified in the mid-twentieth century).
Thankfully, in the decades since then, there’s a lot more emphasis on spoken and colloquial Irish. On Patrick’s Day, I attended a music festival where one stage was all young Irish musicians speaking and performing in Irish, with a lot of the audience understanding what they were saying.
If you have a spare 13 minutes, I’d recommend watching the charming short film, “Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom” about a Chinese man who learns Irish before coming to Ireland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqYtG9BNhfM
Since I’d never heard anyone pronounce a Gaelic word as a youngin, I thought it was pronounced “Proyn-she-uhs”. But I think I read somewhere its the Gaelic form of Pontius, as in Pontius Pilot, and is actually pronounced “Prawn-she-is’.
Your first stab at pronunciation wasn’t far off. You’d get away with “uhs” as the final syllable. I’d also say that the first “o” is pronounced similar to the first syllable in the English word, “onion” (as opposed to an “aw” sound).
(much of English is actually phonetic as well, except there's no marker for whether the word is using the Anglo-Saxon scheme, the Germanic one, the Nordic one, Greek, Latin, or some combination of those within a word e.g. "television". Or absolute nonsense like someone using the Greek scheme for Gaelic resulting in "ptarmigan")
Perhaps, I should now take the time to reverse engineer it.