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Comment by robofanatic | Hacker News Reader

Non-native speaker here. True story: this was long time ago when we used to work in offices and people actually used to sit in tall cubicles with names printed on it. I was the new guy and needed some help from IT so I walked up to the cubicle of the IT guy called Sean and said "Hey Seen, how is it going". There was like 30 seconds of silence and he said "it's Shawn, whats up" and then followed a very awkward conversation :-)

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I know a friend with that name, Sean. He works in consumer service dept and he is the only Sean/Shawn/Shaun in there, everyone knows they are asking for him. Usually his coworker will transfer the call to him and say "Give me a moment, I will transfer you to Sean, as in Sean Connery, who will handle this". It also help a lot when doing intake over the phone. If there are name are that so much similarities, it is best to use the reference of the name to help them.

"Sean" (properly, Seán) is actually an Irish Gaelic name. Irish, like English, features very many non-phonetic spellings. If the guy deliberately made you feel embarrassed for mispronouncing his name, he was just being a dick.

No he was actually a good guy, we became friends later. I apologized for butchering his name.

Having learned some Irish Gaelic in the past, I'd say it actually has much better correlation between spelling and pronunciation than English, it's just that it uses very different rules, which can cause confusion when the words are brought into other languages.

'S' for example is always pronounced like the English 'sh' if it's next to 'e' or 'i', and like a regular English 's' if it's next to 'a', 'o' or 'u'.

Actually Irish is very phonetic, more like say German than English. The rules are just different because a roman alphabet was used for a non-romanic language. "S" is always pronounced as "sh" when surrounded by slender vowels. Many consonants in Irish have two different sounds for a slender and a broad pronunciation.

English has some of that. C or G are usually soft before E or I and hard before A O or U.

When we first started working with Irish teammates, we were confused about who people were referring to when they talked about Owen as there was no Owen in Slack at all.

There was an Eoghan, though.

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