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Yeah, I've found some Kennedy's way back in my tree. I know what you're saying - most everyone has some Irish in them. Which is why being 1/16th Irish is a strange thing to be proud of, for me. It's trendy to name your kids Irish things now like it was trendy to name them German things in the 20's or so, and I bet German names would have grated on my nerves back then too, although I really like them now.

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And they did have a hard time the first 100 years or so, but that's done now, their descendants are the majority. (Speaking of Irish immigrants to America, not Ireland Irish.)

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And English being so disorganized is one of the reasons Gaelic phonetics bother me so much, actually. We have words from almost every set of phonetic standards in our language, but mh is never v and ci is USUALLY see. And it's so hard for people to get the hugely complicated rules of English phonetics down in the first place that throwing these seemingly random sets of letters around and declaring that they sound like something completely different from what they look like makes me defensive. (I MUCH prefer anglicanized spellings to the original Irish ones. I don't mind misspellings of names if they make pronunciation easier - the main exception to this one being Michael.)

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So anyway, I hope you can understand my arguments a bit better and appreciate that they were based on the same set of facts. I think?