I'm no Brit. I just thought we should ask the Irish speakers instead.
I thought I once asked an Irish friend (not so sure of this though; I can confirm) and he mentioned like 'gh' is a consonant proper to the language, a consonant we are not used to hear in English and so we approximate. I'm now in Pakistan and the Urdu language (and I suppose Hindi too) has this consonant they call "ghain". But again, it is not pronounced like 'gain' nor 'hain' but somewhere in between.
You must have native Hebrew speakers around you, and the closest I can think of is the guttural consonant 'kaf', transliterated normally as 'kh', or the less rough consonant 'heth'.
Above, I mentioned that when we don't have the exact equivalent in our own language, we tend to approximate.
Just take this one: In English, the second son of Noah in the Bible is 'Ham'. In Italian, it is 'Cam' (as in camera).
In the original Hebrew, the first letter is the single consonant 'heth' whose sound is between k and h. English translators thought it was closer to H and made it Ham. Italians who have no H in their alphabet (there is in fact but is silent) approximated it to K.
If my second explanation more confusing, just stick to my first suggestion: Ask a native Irish speaker to pronounce it.
Interesting view but I’m not sure that is what Ric is asking. I may be wrong but I get the feeling he wants’ to know how the English would have pronounced the word Gallagher to the settlers and how they would then have applied it to the island?
I’m going to stick my neck out here and suggest that my rendition of the phonetic spelling of Gallagher may be tainted by time and socio economic factors.
In the 30’s the officer cadre of the empire were mostly recruited from young aspiring males from a public school and university back ground.
OK I tick those boxes but even though I was sent to public school to deal with a learning difficulty I had prior to the age of 11 been to primary school with my local peers. Here I picked up the southwest trait for slurring the end of words and dropping my ‘h’ much to the disguised of my upwardly social mobile mother.
At 11 I attended a public school, which specialised in learning difficulties and was encouraged to speak like a gentleman.
At 18 I left home to go to university in an inner city in the north west of England where I was considered posh. People at home now consider my accent to be northern whilst colleagues may still be surprised to here me slur a word such as ‘furrr’
What I will do is speak to my godson who is living with a very well brought up young girl who ticks all of the ‘officer’ boxes.
The question to ask her is what is the surname of the brothers who used to head the band Oasis (Noel and Liam Gallagher)
I’ve already asked a number of people tonight and its about 50/50 my rendition to a straight Gallagher. To get this right we need to be asking the right type of English person.