As we saw from a hilarious video from BuzzFeed earlier this month, pronouncing traditional Irish names isn’t as easy as it looks for people from overseas.
Now another video has gone viral to reinforce the point only this time the participants aren’t American, they’re our closest neighbours, Britain – and across the world in Australia.
The Americans on the BuzzFeed video gave it a good effort but often came up short. The ladies from England and Australia don’t fare much better in this new video from prolific YouTube content creator Clisare.
The video starts with Clisare (an Irishwoman) explaining the premise to us. She will simply ask some of you YouTube friends to pronounce some Irish names – what could be simpler?
Well as it turned out, they did no better than the Americans. Australian Louna did seem to do slightly better than English Ellen. However, Louna became increasingly frustrated with her own inability to read the names. Warning – some of her language isn’t for the faint hearted.
When asked to pronounce ‘Meadhbh’ Ellen was at a loss. She simply said: “There’s too many consonants in this name!”
She ended up desperately hoping for some easy names from classic Irish comedy Father Ted.
The girls gave it their best shot but like the Americans they found it extremely difficult to interpret the Irish spellings.
Ellen eventually apologised to Irish people for ‘butchering your names’.
Take a look at the video below. Contains strong language.