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If I were Irish, I would use Aoife, Siobhan or Maeve as middle names. I really love them but they are kind of out there and unheard of, and everyone would mispronounce them. I went to high school with a Siobhan who heard in every class the first day of class "I'm sorry but I have no idea how to pronounce this name?"

Too hard to pron. I have no idea how any of them are pron. Can you please tell me? I think I've seen Caoimhe pron. Kee vuh, and it looks NOTHING like that.

I really like Saoirse, but the prn is definitely not intuitve for American. Also love Sorcha. I think both are evocative and lovely, but you would definitely have to live with the fact that people will struggle with the spelling and pronunciation.

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Aoife is nice, too, but it is so close to the fairly popular Eva, that I don't care for it as much. Caoimhe doesn't do much for me.

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I would definitely use Saoirse or Sorcha, though.

Yeah, the pronunciation / spelling thing is a problem for many of them. It just draws too much attention to the name as a word, rather than as the name of a person.

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Some Irish names have conventional Anglicizations if you just like the sound of them.. like Keeva for Caoimhe. Aoife is not that different sounding from Eva if you say it EEva. I don't think there is a common one for Saoirse, but you can make one up (although you'd have to be tough minded enough to use it even though people reacted negatively to it, which they always always will to anything they haven't seen before).

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I think they'd make fine middle names even with the Irish spelling, especially if you have a lot of Irish blood.

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- chazda

I think Saoirse sounds really cool. But they are all hard to pronounce when you look at them. A child would forever be correcting people when their name is called in class, etc. (Unless you live in Ireland, of course) I think they'd be great middle names but use them as first names if you love them.