Say It Right

Say It Right is our small, ongoing series of pronunciation guides — one word or name at a time — for the languages behind the stories we tell. It exists because saying a word properly is one of the easiest and most genuine forms of respect available to us, and because so many of these words are routinely, cheerfully mangled by English-language habit.

Why pronunciation matters here

The word in our own name makes the case. Sidhe is Irish, and it is not “sid” or “sidhee” — it sounds, roughly, like “shee,” the “d” silent, the same word as the modern Irish sí. Say it that way and you have signalled, in a single syllable, that you know what you are talking about. Say it the English-spelling way and you have signalled the opposite, however much you love the material.

That is the whole idea in miniature. Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton do not follow English spelling rules, and trying to read them as if they did produces sounds that would puzzle any speaker. These are living languages with living speakers, several of them recovering from long, deliberate suppression. Pronouncing their words with care is a way of treating them as languages rather than as decorative shapes.

What the series is

Each Say It Right entry is a short, focused micro-guide to a single word or name — a being, a festival, a place, a figure from the tales. A typical entry gives you:

• The word in its correct spelling, diacritics and all.
• The language it belongs to, named specifically — Irish is not Scottish Gaelic is not Welsh, and none of them is a blanket “Gaelic” or “Celtic.”
• A plain-English approximation of how it sounds, of the “roughly shee” kind, with a note on stressed syllables and any silent letters.
• A little context: what the word means, where it comes from, and why it is so often said wrongly.

We keep each one short on purpose. The aim is a guide you can read in a minute and actually remember, not a phonetics lecture.

What it is not

Say It Right is help, not gatekeeping. Nobody is born knowing how to say Samhain or Cù Sìth or Mabinogi, and getting these wrong is not a moral failing — it is just what happens when a word travels into a language whose rules do not fit it. The series is here to make the right pronunciation easy to find and easy to keep, not to make anyone feel caught out. Our approximations are also honest approximations: English cannot reproduce every sound in these languages exactly, and where that is true we say so and point toward a native speaker rather than pretend our respelling is perfect.

Where the guides live and how to add to them

The individual Say It Right guides are published as we make them, and this page serves as their home — over time it will gather and link the entries as the series grows. If there is a word or name you keep hearing butchered and would like us to tackle, tell us through our contact page, ideally with the language it comes from. Suggestions and corrections from native speakers are especially welcome; if we have approximated a sound clumsily, we would genuinely rather know. Saying these words right is, in its quiet way, part of keeping the old stories properly.