We were heading up to Malin Head this afternoon as my cousins have come to stay for a few days from Belfast. They are staying in a lovely little cottage with a view of the Atlantic Ocean.
We watched Andy Murray lose in the final of Wimbledon – my dad’s from the same town as the last British winner of the men’s singles there… Fred Perry from Stockport! Apparently he was born on Carrington Road – Carrington was the surname of my great-grandparents. Coincidence or what!
My crawling is becoming really quite fine-tuned. My ground speed is increasing every day and I am “becoming a handful” according to people 😉 More in the next post I believe!
Hi little man!
I am the mommy to a canadian Faolan! In a fit of sleep deprevation this morning i was googling your name in the hopes of finally discovering the accurate pronounciation of your name. Our Faolan had been fay-lynn to us since finding this lovely name. It applealed to our mixed scot/irish heritage. But i’ve seen so many pronounciations my head is spinning ( or maybe its just lack of sleep). So. How does your family say your name? Since you live on that lovely green island, I figured I’d ask your opinion. I stumbled upon Frank McCourt reading it as fway-lan, and would think he would have had it right. What say you? Have you met any orher babies with this name? Is it a family one? I’d like to have some accuracy on this as my Faolan is now 9 months and everyone we meet says it differently, with some hilarious results.
Cheers from Canada!
Julie
Hi Julie,
Thanks for writing – daddy’s a bit slow these days, so he hasn’t helped me update the blog for a long time!
Over here we pronounce it almost Fwee-lan – with the ‘a’ being almost an ‘o’. So, it’s somewhere between Fwee-lan and Fwee-lon. I’m gonna have fun with it when I learn to say it! We were told by a native Irish speaker, so we assume it’s correct.
I got the name as it means ‘little wolf’ in old Irish. Or there’s another derivation meaning ‘seagull’. But, seeing I was nocturnal both before and after being born, little wolf has stuck.
I’m the only one I know with the name, although apparently, it’s often a surname… with the O’ at the beginning.
There’s a couple of recordings here – http://www.forvo.com/word/faol%C3%A1n/ – make sure you copy and paste because the fada on the ‘a’ is needed.
Good luck and greetings from a cold, but sunny Ireland
Faolán