After having posted a thread about whether this name seems prohibitively weird to Spanish-speakers (consensus: weird, but perhaps not prohibitively), I have another question:
Does this name scream “Irish”?
(We are not Irish and have no particularly affinity to Irishness. We love the name for its sound, not its cultural connotations. Would you assume an [name_f]Una[/name_f] to be a girl with Irish heritage?).
It doesn’t have any Irish connotations to me. I actually didn’t know it was Irish, I thought it was Spanish. The average joe won’t think Irish, because it doesn’t even remotely sound that way to me personally.
I would never think of this name as Irish, it was my great grandmother’s name and she was Iroquois native, but the name comes from another language (I think maybe Hopi). It means “one who remembers”.
[name_f]Una[/name_f], no. [name_f]Oona[/name_f], yes. If not heritage, then at least a fondness for Irish culture. [name_f]Una[/name_f] should be fine, though.
I really like [name_f]Una[/name_f], and no, it doesn’t scream Irish to me. I think it can definitely work internationally, thanks to its simple spelling and pronunciation.
Hmmmm. So we may be leaning toward the [name_f]Oona[/name_f] spelling to differentiate for the Spanish word for ‘one’, in which case it sounds like the association with Irishness becomes an issue. Hmmmm.
I have known two girls named [name_f]Oona[/name_f] and neither were hugely Irish. Maybe if I had asked them they could have dug in their family trees to find some Irish roots somewhere? [name_f]Oona[/name_f] is one of my favorite names of all time and although I know it is Irish, I have never met an Irish [name_f]Oona[/name_f]. (I also live in [name_m]New[/name_m] [name_f]England[/name_f], USA so that may be why)