How To Correctly Say “Samhain”

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The Only Dream That Matters Is the One You Wake Up From Old enough to know better/M/Boston/Married. I'm a Ph.D. in computer science and linguistics. I run on metal, wordplay, and snark. Most of the languages I speak are dead. Search Posts How to correctly say “Samhain”

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pumpkinskull:
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thewitchlessons:
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
where’s that post that’s like:
how to say celtic words:
1. read the word
2. wrong
3. fuk u
Welcome to Celtic, where the letters don’t matter and the pronunciations are made up.
sooooo…. i am not a native irish speaker, but i am a linguist who has studied it some, and from what i know, a “shavna” pronunciation makes no sense. yes, there is no “v” so /v/ is written “mh,” but, only in narrow contexts. in broad contexts, like here, “mh” makes a /w/ sound. from what i can tell, in some dialects it makes a /vˠ/, but that sound isn’t found in english, and /w/ is arguably a more accurate substitution than /v/.
likewise, “s” only makes the “sh” /ʃ/ sound in narrow contexts. here, again, it’s broad. and why would there be another whole syllable after the “n” ?
the pronunciation as something like “sawain” makes logical sense, and i’d expect the native pronunciation to be something like /sˠawənʲ/ (very roughly “saw one”) and according to wiktionary it’s usually something like /sˠaunʲ/ (a bit like “sound”). (/nʲ/ is like “ny” or spanish ñ, somewhat)
also i was under the impression that lenition (what causes s/ʃ→h shifts) doesn’t care about the speaker’s gender, it’s a morphophonological change (AKA it depends on changes to or around a word, like the introduction of an indefinite article, or if the noun itself is feminine and nominative, but that has nothing to do with the speaker’s gender).
i apologize for doubting you OP, but i’m very confused right now. i’ve always gotten a pretty clear impression that irish orthography actually makes completely perfect sense (with a few exceptions, like in any language), if you spend a few hours learning it, and it seems odd that so many sources would claim a “sawain”-like pronunciation (not just for english, but for irish, and gaelic, and welsh as well) if that were not the case.
tl;dr actually yes it is sawain (or sown) (maybe shavnah makes sense in some dialect but idfk)
It’s possible the OP may be using the genitive form, Samhna. The festival itself is called Lá Samhna (Lá = “Day”) in Irish. I suppose there may be dialects that retain the /v/ pronunciation in that form. Still doesn’t explain the “Sh”, though. I’m also confused at what the OP was trying to convey with “vh” and “hv” in their spelling pronunciation.

Also not an Irish speaker, just a linguist who studied it some (and studied it more after being called out on some mistakes here on Tumblr a few years ago). Samhna as a shortening of Lá Samhna makes sense to me at least. If you drop the Lá, it’s still implied by the genitive case, like when you say “Christmas” instead of “Christmas Day.” I also hear this sort of thing in Hindi a lot, where things that from an English speaker’s perspective are crucial parts of the phrase are just dropped and left to be inferred from context, leaving what appear to be some very odd constructions. Not unheard of cross-linguistically at all. Plus the Irish word for “November” is “Mí Na Samhna” (Month of [the] Samhain).

The pronunciation looks like maybe it’s a Munster pronunciation. From what I know, <mh> (and <bh>) there seem to often be rendered as /βˠ/ in broad environments, and without the IPA, it’s often easier to render that as <v> (or maybe even <vh>). This would appear to be an older pronunciation, held over from the days when <mh> and <bh> were literally just the homorganic fricatives of /m/ and /b/, /β̃/ and /β/ respectively (nasalization on /β̃/ subsequently dropped). Similarly, <s> in a broad environment is /sˠ/, which I can also see how without IPA it may be rendered with <sh>. Maybe this is a bit of a stretch but I can see potential explanations for all purported anomalies in the OP’s post.

(via datasoong47)