Ó hAoḋa

About Me

What is My Actual Name?§

The home page of this website introduces me as “Aindréas Ó hAoḋa (Aindréas Ó hAodha / Andrew Hayes)”, which I imagine could cause some confusion, especially for non-Irish people. If you were to ask “Well, what does it say on your birth certificate?”, you’d likely only be further confused, as the name on my birth certificate¹ is not any of those names and is, in fact, ヘイズ、アンデュ マイカル (Heizu, Andyu Maikaru). In general, the confusion surrounding my name can be put down to the fact that I’m an Irishman, and thus legally entitled to use both the anglicised and gaelicised form of my name, and that I was born in Japan, so my name had to be transcribed into Japanese for the documentation surrounding my birth.

• In English, my name is Andrew Hayes, and this is how most people know me, and what it says on the majority of my official documents. This is the name that my family uses for me, and how most of my friends know me.
• I also go by the gaelicised form of my name Aindréas Ó hAodha, especially when I’m speaking Irish; it’s from this name that the domain name of this website is derived.
  • The two spellings listed on the homepage of this website for this surname, Ó hAodha and Ó hAoḋa depend on how traditional one is being with the orthography of the Irish language: traditionally, a lenited consonant in Irish is written with the use of a ponc séimhithe (dot of lenition / overdot), hence Ó hAoḋa, but in modern, standardised Irish, and particularly when using Roman type, the letter h is used to indicate a lenited consonant, and hence Ó hAodha. The two forms would be considered equivalent and interchangeable by an Irish speaker.
  • A non-Irish reader may also be confused by the letters used to write Aindréas Ó hAoḋa: this is just how the string “Aindréas Ó hAoḋa” is written in the traditional Gaelic typeface (Cló Gaelaċ) — the R and the S are particularly confusing when one sees them for the first time!
  • When I was younger, I also briefly went by Aindriú Ó hAodha and used the alternative misspelling Andreas.
• My official documents from the brief, early period of my life spent in Japan list my name as ヘイズ、アンデュ マイカル (Heizu, Andyu Maikaru), which is a somewhat questionable attempt at rendering “Andrew Michael Hayes” in Japanese, written by a doctor who couldn’t speak any English and is therefore, in his defense, quite a decent attempt.
  • When I have cause to write my name in Japanese myself, typically either when I was actively studying the language or on forms when I returned to visit, I usually write ヘイズ・アンドリュー (Heizu Andoryu), which is a more standard way of transliterating the name “Andrew” into Japanese.

Languages I Speak§

My first language is English, and is the only language in which I would claim to be fluent. I have decent conversational Irish, and have similar proficiency in Irish to people who describe themselves as fluent but I would consider my Irish to still need a lot of work before I could consider myself fluent. I did French at school and, inspired by the conversational ability I was building by arguing with French people through French, have picked up a casual effort to improve my French; I would nonetheless regard my French as far from passable. When I left Japan as an infant, I was too young to have picked up any language, but I took some Japanese lessons outside of school as a teenager and sat the Leaving Certificate exam for Japanese as an extra subject; I let my Japanese stagnate for a while, but as I picked up my French again, I’ve been making a casual effort to at the very least improve my vocabulary and kanji knowledge. I would say my Japanese is by far the weakest of any language that I claim to have any ability in whatsoever.

I also took a weekly introduction to Irish Sign Language class while at university, but in the absence of opportunities to practice my sign language, it has generally stagnated and I am now barely able to spell my own name and talk about going to the pub.

Countries I’ve Visited§

In the below map, I count myself as having visited a country if I’ve actually set foot on the ground of that country and breathed its air: I don’t count countries I’ve only travelled through without setting foot on the ground, but I do count, for example, the United Arab Emirates although I only spent a few hours there on a layover, as I did walk out and about in the city of Abu Dhabi.

At present, this map operates on a per-country basis with countries defined using three-letter country codes (ISO 3166-1 alpha-3), which can appear confusing as, for example, it includes French Guyana as part of France, and therefore because I have been to France, highlights French Guyana as somewhere to which I’ve been — despite me never having been south of Washington D.C. in the Americas. At some point in the future, I’ll likely update this map to operate on a per-territory basis: it seems silly that this map suggests I’ve been to French Guyana or Hawaiʻi, or even the fact that the entire USA is highlighted despite me having only been to Washington D.C. I would like the map to reflect the fact that I’ve been to Scotland and England, but not Wales, and therefore not highlight Wales as somewhere I’ve been to, but because it treats the entire United Kingdom as a single entity, Wales too is highlighted. There’s also the unfortunate effect of this map defining countries only as those recognised by ISO, and therefore could be misconstrued as me making political statements about which countries I do or don’t recognise, although I suppose for expediency’s sake it makes sense to defer those decisions to a faceless organisation rather than appointing myself as the arbiter of such things.