Oh, look! The last straw! In another post in this forum, Theryon Stormrune brought back news of the forthcoming Mummy's Mask preview, which featured Estra and her dead husband Honaire. He mentioned that you pronounce the 'e' on the end. He did not mention how. There have been a number of things I've encountered in PACG that I'm not certain how to pronounce. Achaekek. Hshurha. Erastil. Sajan. Now this. I'd like to settle this.
I've compiled a list of the iconics, their companions, and the gods for blessings. It's an incomplete list, since I don't have my own copy of WotR, and haven't played past adventure 4, and did those blessings from memory. Also, it consists exclusively of my wild guesses as to how everything is pronounced. Each name has beneath it, a simplified IPA pronunciation and a more Americanist short-vowel-long-vowel pronunciation, so hopefully everyone who's interested will understand at least one of them. I know only enough IPA to be dangerous, so there may be errors in my intended pronunciations, for which I apologize.
If there's already such a list somewhere, great! Let me know! If not, then maybe we can put a reference together.
I don't intend to try to do pronunciations for every proper name and non-dictionary word on any card in PACG. I don't intend to spill out into the RPG and take on all those names. I'd like to limit this to things are are likely to keep coming up in the card game.
Some people may say that it's an RPG of sorts, you can make the characters your own, that includes how you say them... but no. There are at least intended pronunciations of these things, even if there aren't official ones. I'm really interested in those. I'm not the only one, since someone else thought it was worth noting that "Honaire" had one more syllable than you'd guess. Let's figure this out.
Link in a moment.
Here's a thread. In that thread, I think they mentioned James Jacobs had a thread about that or something similar.
Okay. Link's ready. I apologize for the large file size. Document is here:
http://www.objetsdart.ca/Pf/Pronunciations%200_0.pdf
I'll take any suggestions, including ones of the variety, "this is how we always pronounced it..." but I would like to know what your source is, if you have one.
A primer on the pronunciation symbols: IPA is capable of doing may things, including recording regional accents and speech impediments. This document attempts to keep it simple, and tries to mimic a North American accent. None of that upside-down "r" nonsense, either. Right-side-up "r"s will do for our purposes. We know what we mean by them.
The perfectly vertical apostrophe before some syllables means primary stress. The perfectly vertical comma before others indicates secondary stress. The stress in the word "summertime" would be 'sum-mer-,time.
The upside-down e is a schwa. Most unstressed short vowels round down to this. In the word "human" we don't say short A like in "can", long A as in "humane" or the "ah" sound like a Ferenghi. We only say enough vowel to get us from the M to the N. That's a schwa.
A lot of the vowels before R's look wacky. Let's take Leryn as an example. I have it as rhyming "baron" or "Erin" but the vowel written there before the R is a short E, as in "let". This looks crazy at first glance, but it's right, even if we want to think of it as a long A. If you try saying "lay-rin" out loud, you'll hear that that's a bad approximation of the thing we mean to say. "leh-rin", on the other hand, is pretty close.
English long O's are definitely bizarre. We tend to bend that vowel in pretty much every English dialect, and IPA reflects this.
Many iconics' names seem to come straight out of other countries, Alain, Hayato and Reiko being among the obvious; Imrijka and Cailean being less obvious. I've tried to mimic the pronunciation closer to the original language they came from (so our ninja and samurai get normal-looking O's in IPA), but I could be way off. Corrections are most welcome.
The Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting book has a pronunciation guide attached to it, but it hasn't been updated.
There's a lot of threads on paizo.com regarding pronunciation, you do have to wander outside the PACG specific forums though.
|
Everytime I want to pronounce something, I look it up on the Pathfinder Wiki. Achaekek, for example... (Where I learned that the god of Assassins is a MALE mantis-form, which made me laugh. If someone seeks demi-godhood and doesn't want to be murdered by Achaekek, they just need to use their near-divine power to find him a mate. Problem solved.)
|
|
My apologies for not being clear about the pronunciation. It was an assumption I made that was incorrect.
When we first were pronouncing Honaire, the "e" on the end was silent. We were informed that in the creation of Estra, Honaire was actually a family name of a designer. So when we found out that the "E" on the end was pronounced, I wanted to mention that. It is an American long E sound.
In my group we take some liberties with pronunciations.
Achaekek, for example, is ack-'ack-ak-check (or something along those lines; it varies each time). Often we call it the "Bacon Blessing" because it looks like bacon.
Cayden Cailean has taken on a life of its own and become "Cayden Ca-leel" (thanks to Chad of the Chadturn).
Berbalang has turned into "Whooo-aaa black Betty, Berbalang! Whooo-aaa black Betty, Berbalang!"
Half of us say lee-nee, the other half say Lih-nee.
There's one more that we always butcher... can't remember it right now.
Thanks, folks. I did try looking at wikis and so forth, but there are a lot of holes. I will enjoy looking at those other threads when I get home from work.
I was surprised when I discovered 'milani' was pronounced 'meh-Law-nee'
Achaekek, for example, is ack-'ack-ak-check (or something along those lines; it varies each time).
I just do an impersonation of Popeye laughing.
Don't get me started on how we pronounce them in French :-)
I was surprised when I discovered 'milani' was pronounced 'meh-Law-nee'
Huh. That is surprising. I've been pronouncing it as meh-lah-nee, like the cookie but with ee at the end instead of oh.
|
I was surprised when I discovered 'milani' was pronounced 'meh-Law-nee'Huh. That is surprising. I've been pronouncing it as meh-lah-nee, like the cookie but with ee at the end instead of oh.
I think that is the same?
Neil Spicer once told me that Erastil is AIR-uh-stil, and we'd always said eh-RAS-til.
We also always said Sarenrae as suh-REN-ray instead of SAIR-en-ray.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I was surprised when I discovered 'milani' was pronounced 'meh-Law-nee'Huh. That is surprising. I've been pronouncing it as meh-lah-nee, like the cookie but with ee at the end instead of oh.
Remember when Hawkmoon pronounced Milani incorrectly?
Pepperidge Farm Remembers.
Really?? I'd've gone with the aliens on Mars Attacks.I just do an impersonation of Popeye laughing.Achaekek, for example, is ack-'ack-ak-check (or something along those lines; it varies each time).
I'm old. Classic cartoons are more my gig.
In my group we usually pronounce Iomedae asl YO-meh-day. But then we're gGermans, and pronoincing and i like AYE in a word that isn't English feels wrong. :)
(also mee-LAH-nee, sah-REN-ray, eh-RAS-til)