msv133 wrote:
I guess I get this in some cases. For example, the name James translate to Sheamus in Irish. The J goes to Sh and the silent e becomes audible. So in this case, I think it's basically due to the way that the languages have adopted the phonetics of the latin-roman alphabet.
But then there are some that make less sense to me, like "Michael" is translated to a name that sounds like "Mee-Hall". This does not make sense from a phonetic standpoint. And then it gets me thinking, why should names be pronounced differently at all? I mean, it's a name, there it's not like regular words where each language has a different word for it...
"Michael" means "who is like God" in Hebrew (I think), but that is already lost in the English translation.
Thanks.
Languages, and the sounds possible in languages change over time. At the time when the name Michael was borrowed into Irish, from Latin, the C in the centre of the word would have been pronounced closer to the sound of a hard K, and hence more similarly to the Hebrew, and to Latin and other borrowings of that name. In the Old Irish period, "ch" in the centre of a word would have been similar to "ch" at the start of a word in Modern Irish, so still closer to the original borrowing than how it is pronounced now. In the course of the last 1,400 years, lenited letters in the centre and at the end of Irish words have been softened further still, hence, the H sound in the middle of the name now. This phenomenon can be seen in other Irish words also, like
leabhar, from Latin
liber. It now has a W sound in the middle, but when it was initially borrowed from Latin, it would have had a hard B sound.