Welcome to ILF, Caroline. To get you started, 'slipéir bhailé' - 'ballet slippers'. Not sure that it is the best suggestion you will get on the forum...... Wait for more.

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Totally unrelated to your question, do you know that the founder of the Argentinian navy, Admiral Brown, was from a village in the west of Ireland? Foxford, in County Mayo, celebrates the connection between it and Argentina. I believe there were great celebrations in Foxford when it was announced that the new pope was Argentinian. Totally off topic!

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You could just stick with the simple word "ballet", which is Bailé. People should be able to handle the pronunciation (roughly, using amateur Anglo phonetics): "BUH-lyay" or (in Munster, where the emphasis would move to the second syllable) "buh-LYAY".

In case you were wondering, in Saoirse's suggestion, it has an added "h" for grammatical reasons, which would not be present when using the word by itself.

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

I think bailé might sound a bit more like "buh-LyEH", but I don't think that name would work very well in Argentina.

The word for "dance" in Spanish is baile which is identical to the word bailé except for the síneadh fada. I'm pretty sure that every single person who sees it will assume it's the Spanish word baile and think that the "accent mark" is a typo, and it wouldn't come across very well to run around "correcting" everyone. I think it might be better to choose a distinctly Irish word that doesn't look like a recent loan word or like some other word in Spanish. Unfortunately, I can't think of a name off the top of my head.

Interesting. I wonder if it is just a coincidence? Seems unlikely.

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I dunno. It's nice to keep in mind the meanings of similar words in other languages when you're in a non-English speaking country. Even in New Mexico, lots of funny misunderstandings happen when Spanish speakers from other places come here.

single slender l between vowels never has a ly-sound, it's always a "light" L (slightly palatalised but no y-sound).
Bailé is pronounced "bah-lay".



I'd say it's the French word "ballet", which is pronounced [balɛ], ie. almost as in Irish. And my English dictionary says "ballet" is pronounced more or less the same way (with the English vowels and diphthongs of course).

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

Yeah, I know what you mean. That's why I deliberately put a small "y" but capitalized all of the other letters in that syllable. That was my attempt to show the slightly palatalized slender "L" sound.


I think writing "bah-lay" makes the word look like it has a broad "L" sound and also doesn't show which syllable is stressed. Of course, I'm not saying that my little phonetic rendering was any better though.

These are just rough approximations and I think it's always better to actually hear the word spoken, instead of trying to figure it out from written pronunciations based on English phonetical spelling.

Meanwhile, back to the original question. Any suggestions that might actually work?

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