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Irish Gaelic pronunciation is rather difficult to learn, and for me harder to remember. Needlessly modest NW is as expected correct. 1.Samhain (Celtic) ... in the pagan calendar. Samhain may be pronounced in a number of ways but the most common pronunciation is "sow-in" (sow rhymes with cow). The modern day ... http://www3.kumc.edu/diversity/ethnic_relig/samhain.html
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"Guy" must be a very old name, back to Norman era, when it would have been pronounced hard g "Gee".
Now it is pronounced like "buy", but was it so pronounced at the time of the Gunpowder Plot?
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I fear that I have (litterally) a pronounced case of samhainophobia.
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Which just goes to prove that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, no matter how litterall you get! 
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Dear CK: I was counting on your knowing the eee vs eye answer.
And I am mildly lachrymose that nobody questioned "Sam Hill" I don't have any idea how it originated.
PS I finally found a site about it, but it wasn't worth citing. Most probably antique euphemism for "hell".
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One of the usual games at Halloween parties for kids used to be bobbing for apples. I learned something new from that URL.
For example, bobbing for apples was a marriage divination that indicated
who (the first person to bite an apple) would marry first in the coming year.
Sounds as though that ought to have been restricted to young adults instead of kids.
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Here is a URL with information about Guy Fawkes, including assertion he was also called "Guido" which suggests he pronounced his name the modern French way. In 1605, Guy Fawkes (also known as Guido - yes, really) and a group of conspirators attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. http://www.bonefire.org/guy/index.html
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"Sam Hill" is indeed a euphemism for hell. My father used to ask, rhetorically, "What the Sam Hill blazes do you mean by .... ?"
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Around 1600 the long /i:/ sound of Guy, Guido (and of buy, blind, mice, etc.) was in the middle of changing to the modern /ai/. Authentic performances of Shakespeare, and of songs from the same period, use the diphthong /@i/ (where @ = schwa).
The effect is something like the French oeil.
A similar vowel is still heard in the West Country of England, where people will call you moey loev at first meeting.
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My dictionary (Chambers) marks guiser as (Scot.) and also gives guisard. These it glosses by the equally evocative word mummer. However, Alan Garner wrote a book The Guiser, I think of short stories, folk tales. I'm a huge Garner fan but to my shame I haven't read this. But he's very much a Cheshire writer, so I'd expect his use of 'guiser' to be local for him.
The splendidly snappy word geezer is a variant of 'guiser' too.
The root is wise, meaning 'way, manner', as in 'in this wise' and 'clockwise'; taken from Germanic into French with the usual change to a gw- sound. (I always wonder if that was Breton influence.)
A guise is a way of behaving, a manner or mannerism, an external appearance: and thus by extension such an appearance that one is capable of adopting or dissembling or dis-guising.
Well I enjoy language. :-)
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