How to you pronounce Azlanti?


Lost Omens Campaign Setting General Discussion


In specific, I'm curious about Jaidi - recently it was mentioned to me that it may well be pronounced "H'eye-dee" (the "J" making an "H" sound like "who" or "Huh?" - as in "Javier" or "juego") though I'd thought of it more like "J'ay'dee" (with a hard "j" and long "a" sound - basically the word "Jade" with a long "e" sound like "ee" or "ii" or whatever you wanna write it).

Of course, these various things could represent a short "i" sound at the end, a long-"a"-fading-into-long-"i" in the middle, a "J" with a "Y"-sound (like "Bjorn" or "Jorginson") or really any other number of combinations.

While it's all made up, of course, and there likely isn't a hard, solid form of pronunciation, I'm curious what's meant with it - both in this name and in Azlanti-form names in general.

I have similar questions about Thassilonian pronunciations, too, if anyone knows - I've always excepted that it's really on-the-nose/obvious English-language-transliterations rather than translations, but the concept that it might not be has got my head spinning (probably needlessly - thanks remarkably vague PIE-language notations that I've been investing myself far too into, recently...)

((As a completely unrelated aside, I am so daggum hype to finally meet Erastil's wife. SO DAGGUM HYPE. I've known about her for a long time, but until stumbling across the fact they're married - and parents to Curnunos and Halcamora, which ohmywordthat'ssoperfectforourgames - makes me so daggum happy, and is recent as of last week or so! Yay!))


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"az-LAN-tee" is how I've always said it.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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Yqatuba is correct.


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Personally I find Jay-dee or Jai-dee flow best for me (hard J's, 'jai' rhymes with eye on the second) but would be flexible to learning there is a different pronunciation. Since Azlanti doesn't likely have a significant real world parallel or inspiration from a particular language, I feel like it's most likely transcribed in such a way as would make intuitive sense to English speakers (but then there may be many Azlanti names I haven't seen yet that defy this assumption)

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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If, on the other hand, you're asking about how to pronounce words in the Azlanti langauge (which is what you ARE asking now that I've actually read the original post)...

... We generally don't have the time to build linguistic rules into our made-up languages. In a few cases, where there's a real-world langauge to take cues from, we use those. Ulfen comes to mind (where it uses Norse as its inspiration), as does Minkaian (which uses Japanese), but for fully made-up languages like Azlanti or Thassilonian, we generally present words phonetically as possible using English construction.

So an Azlanti word spelled "jaidi" would use English rules to pronounce it. So...

JAI-dee is how I'd say it. So it rhymes with CRY-bee.


Awesome! Thank you!


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Azlanti is said like the rear end of a donkey, now that Aroden isn't around to do anything about it.


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I will once again suggest the Star Trek rule for how to pronounce fantasy/sf words- the first person who says the word in question coins the pronunciation.

This is why, for example, Brent Spiner's android character's name is pronounced "Day-tuh" and not "Dah-ta" because Patrick Stewart was the first person so say that character's name in the pilot and he used the British pronunciation of the word (at the time "dah-ta" was more common in the U.S.)


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In Star Trek, the Federation should ask Mr Data how to say it, it being a given name, and the Federation in the TNG time period having a culture of respect for individuals.

I actually don't understand why it really matters in Golarion, and I've heard Paizo staffers use different pronunications of things, so I'm not sure they care either (so long as the meaning is not ambiguous).

You can always guarantee a reaction at an RPG con by uncommon pronuncation, my favourite is 'droe' for drow. You can blame DOTA (a video game) for teaching me that one. They have drow and most didn't play D&D, so many of the players & casters don't know how to say it.

Shadow Lodge

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Moppy wrote:
In Star Trek, the Federation should ask Mr Data how to say it, it being a given name, and the Federation in the TNG time period having a culture of respect for individuals.

Why are you replying in Watsonian to a Doylist proposal?

(And even in a Watsonian perspective, they probably did. Pulaski in Season 2 makes it a point to call him "Dah-ta" even after he corrects her. So clearly he prefers "Day-ta.")

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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Moppy wrote:

I actually don't understand why it really matters in Golarion, and I've heard Paizo staffers use different pronunications of things, so I'm not sure they care either (so long as the meaning is not ambiguous).

You can always guarantee a reaction at an RPG con by uncommon pronuncation, my favourite is 'droe' for drow. You can blame DOTA (a video game) for teaching me that one. They have drow and most didn't play D&D, so many of the players & casters don't know how to say it.

We do care, and there are "correct" ways to pronounce words. We send guides to all of our licensors who do audio work (such as the Starfinder game or video games like Kingmaker or audio dramas). But people have their own ways, and that's not limited to Golarion nouns. I've heard gamers pronounce "necromancer" as "neh-CROW-man-cer," lycanthrope as "LIE-can-thorpe," and the old favorite psionic power id insinuation as "I. D. instigation."

In the end, the way you pronounce things at your table that your fellow players enjoy is right for that table. You WILL encounter other people who say things different, and they may be wrong, you may be wrong, or you BOTH may be wrong.

We did publish a pronunciation guide in the very first hardcover for the Campaign Setting; it took up a couple pages. Since then we've abandoned that because it's something that added a significant amount of work at the end of a process and took up pages we needed for other things. And at this point, we've made SO many words up that publishing a full guide for every word we've created is daunting and, frankly, is unlikely to help finish products on time. It's just not a high priority for us to publish something like that at this point, but in a perfect world we'll get it done some day.

Until then, I'm always happy to do phonetic pronunciations of words that folks ask about... provided I spot the thread! My "Ask James" thread in the off-topics folder is a good place to ask me how to pronounce Golarion words.

EDIT: As for the word "drow," my favorite reply to that question is that it rhymes with "bow."

Spoiler:
HA Love that joke. For real though, drow rhymes with cow. At least, according to the fine folks at WotC, who I'd count as the official source for that word in this context!

Dark Archive

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Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Plus honestly, I'm confused about how half of fantasy names in Pathfinder use phonetic pronunciation(Norgorber is good example :3 I'm not sure why people are flabbergasted by it) then other half are pronounced... Well I assume its english pronunciation that gets "Searing Ray" out of Sarenrae? I'm still not sure how english pronunciation works(I pronounce it like Saren from Mass Effect plus rae which I don't pronounce like ray)


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James Jacobs wrote:
We send guides to all of our licensors who do audio work (such as the Starfinder game or video games like Kingmaker or audio dramas).

Any chance those could be made available somewhere, somehow?

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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CorvusMask wrote:
Plus honestly, I'm confused about how half of fantasy names in Pathfinder use phonetic pronunciation(Norgorber is good example :3 I'm not sure why people are flabbergasted by it) then other half are pronounced... Well I assume its english pronunciation that gets "Searing Ray" out of Sarenrae? I'm still not sure how english pronunciation works(I pronounce it like Saren from Mass Effect plus rae which I don't pronounce like ray)

In which case, feel free to ask! :)

nor-GORE-bur

SAIR-in-ray

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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CrystalSeas wrote:
James Jacobs wrote:
We send guides to all of our licensors who do audio work (such as the Starfinder game or video games like Kingmaker or audio dramas).
Any chance those could be made available somewhere, somehow?

Nope. They mostly exist as emails or chats or whatever back and forth between us and the licensor.

If we hear a large enough number of requests for pronunciation guides, we'll consider creating some, but again... they take a LOT of work and the scope of how many words we would have to include is intimidating and overwhelming. Those of us who could prepare it, and those of us who would then have to edit it, and the back and forth to make it presentable to the world at large, would require significant time taken away from other projects that DO earn us money and ARE behind schedule (Kingmaker comes to mind).

If we get the feeling that there's a big enough demand for something like this to be produced, or if we do a book where including a guide makes sense to the book's pagination and can be included without complicating the book's schedule, then we'll look at doing it.

Until then, my take is that it's not a topic that most gamers really care that much about, and if folks have questions on specific words then post them here or in my Ask James thread and I'll get to them a LOT more quickly than if we were to go build a whole document or blog post or whatever.


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Fair enough. The number of people who care are not likely to overwhelm your thread.


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Hey, on the subject how do you pronounce Magdh or Ng (officially?)

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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Yqatuba wrote:
Hey, on the subject how do you pronounce Magdh or Ng (officially?)

Both of these names were created by James Sutter, but I'm not sure about how he pronounces them. Here's my take:

Magdh: Sounds like "dragged" but replace the "dr" at the start with an "mmm" sound.

Ng: Sounds like the end of any word that end in "-ing". So say, "speaking" but then leave off the "speak".


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Ok, thanks. Is Magdh supposed to look like Gaelic? It does to me but I can only find stuff related to Pathfinder if I google it.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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Yqatuba wrote:
Ok, thanks. Is Magdh supposed to look like Gaelic? It does to me but I can only find stuff related to Pathfinder if I google it.

Yup; it's supposed to evoke that without being that.


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I'm reminded of a story I read some time ago somewhere and went somewhat like this.
There was a GM who would pronounce some words really oddly.
The group encountered a lich that was (for some reason) in a fountain. The GM said, "You see a fountain. There is a leak (his pronunciation for lich) in it".
"Okay, we search the room."
"Umm, what are you going to about the leak?"
So, one of the players said "I put my finger in it."
"He fireballs you."
"WTF???"


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I once was in a group with a player and sometime DM who not only insisted on pronouncing lich "lick" but also pronounced ghoul to rhyme with "scowl", which may have been in some part to irritate me. Also, I went to school in Ireland, so anything that looks Gaelic I will default pronounce as if it were Irish (which has some pronunciation differences from Scots Gaelic), and the place where I would welcome pronunciation guides is specifically with monster names in bestiaries, when they come from RL mythoi or cultures whose pronunciations I am not familiar with, because I'd rather not annoy other people the way some common media mispronunciations of Irish words get to me. ("Samhain" is pronounced "Sow-en", that's sow as in a female pig. The people who make Supernatural really need to learn this.)

Thanks for the disambiguation on drow, BTW; it's good to have a source I can point people to.

Dark Archive

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Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

I mean if you don't want people to get confused about how to pronounce ghoul, English language should have just spelled it as "ghul" as it was in arabic ;p

Seriously though, I'm personally annoyed since I've noticed that I can never correctly guess how english speaking people pronounce words and sometimes I pronounce words wrong since I try to guess how english speaking people would pronounce them only for it to turn out correct pronunciation WAS phonetic this time :P


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CorvusMask wrote:
Well I assume its english pronunciation that gets "Searing Ray" out of Sarenrae? I'm still not sure how english pronunciation works(I pronounce it like Saren from Mass Effect plus rae which I don't pronounce like ray)

British English has "ae" in everyday use (encyclopaedia, paedatrician etc) where it's said like "ee" unless it's the start of a word (like "aeroplane" their spelling of airplane), where it's like American "air-oh-plane".

If they (British) weren't Pathfinder players and you showed them "Sarenrae" they would probably say "sa-REN-ree" with the stress on the middle syllable. We could gamble on where British would put the stress, but the 'ae' is almost guaranteed to come out 'ee'.


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CorvusMask wrote:
I mean if you don't want people to get confused about how to pronounce ghoul, English language should have just spelled it as "ghul" as it was in arabic ;p

Oh! So like the sea bird, then! :V


(That's a joke about "gull" - the seabird - vs. "gool" the undead.)

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