ruminating on how the purposeful mispelling of a lot of ordinary names by (typically white, southern, culturally reactionary) USAmerican parents - examples including stuff like "Graceigh" for Gracey - seem more often than not to be inaccurate cultural echoes of Irish, Scottish and Welsh spellings they may subconsciously think are cooler, possibly more "authentic:"
and there's so many more, I think it's right to call parents selfish by doing this, apparently schools now have entire classes full of kids with names people won't be able to spell or sound out easily, it's not a new name it's just rebranded,
These patterns of how they spell the names aren't random. They're not just made up. They ARE reused in a new way that breaks previous English-language rules, but these come from an orthography that was not English. The earliest Irish system of using the Latin alphabet predates the existence of English and the entire concept of England.
Those extra vowels and consonants had meaning, and morphological importance, and were said out loud, before pronunciations changed over centuries (language always changes) and spellings were simplified - usually forcibly, by the English. It happened in English, too - for example "neighbor" a long time ago had a sound for the "gh", a more throaty version of the "ch" in German - but for Irish, Scottish, Welsh? The English throughout most of their shared history restricted these languages as tight as they could in an effort to kill the language.
And there's something so, so, so interesting about the tragedy of so many miseducated, unable to travel, isolated and uncurious USAmericans not even realizing their family once had another language than English or that Irish as a language even exists, that the names they see and think are cool and trendy are kind of like . . . Name zombies. Reborn but in a corrupted way, like a massive game of generational telephone. Incorrect for both the target language and the borrowing language.
Things they don't even realize are misappropriations that should have been available freely to them in a different time line.
