posted
A friend of mine is making up his own fantasy world, and I get to help. For one of my languages, I'm borrowing heavily from K'iche', a South American language descended from Mayan. The letters don't sound quite like an English speaker would expect, so I'm trying to add a pronunciation guide for place names.
The International Phonetic Guide isn't a whole lot of help since it's very specialized. I don't want folks to have to study a guide to use my guide. Are there simple ideas for writing stuff the way it ought to sound? (Googling that phrase only got me sites for whole language and phonics pages.)
For example, if I just put 'a', it could be anything. But if I use 'ah' or 'ay' you've got a good idea how it should be. I just need something that breaks up vowel sounds, really. They're hard.
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
One of the best ways I've seen is to relate the the sound to a common word.
Rather than writing "ah" or "ay", "a" pronounced as in the english word "sad", tz pronounced as the ch in the word chick.
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Just limit the number of apostrophes in the names and try to keep the number of consecutive consonants down to 2, and you'll probably have names people will be able to pronounce.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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It won't matter if people get it wrong, after all.
You could make a list of vowel sounds. If it's fairly conventional you could use the vowels from Spanish or Japanese, and just add a few more as needed. Japanese has a (father), i (machine), u (tutu), e (fiancee), o (go, more or less).
Posts: 544 | Registered: Mar 2007
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That's just what I was going to say, Qaz. English phonetic spelling conventions (as they are in dictionaries) stink. But most people have some clue about how vowels work in Spanish and Japanese transliteration. Just use that system, which I think enough people default to when encountering a foreign looking word.
If all the consonants of a language sound different, that could be that they don't have aspiration, or a little puff of air, after voiceless stops (t,p,k). That's on reason that people from India sound as they do when they speak English. I don't know if that's your problem, it's just an illustration I thought might ring a bell for you.
There's no reason you have to do everything this language does in the fantasy language. I mean, if you completely mimic that language, then that's not very fantastic.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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JB, maybe I misunderstood the article then. Aren't phonemes the basic unit of one sound? Like ph and f being the same.
I figured if I want to know how 'a' sounds, I need to know its phonemes and how to get them across without the fancy symbology.
Good idea on the dictionary. I should probably have one in the house anyway. Dictionary.com might not always be there when I need it.
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quote:Originally posted by AvidReader: JB, maybe I misunderstood the article then. Aren't phonemes the basic unit of one sound? Like ph and f being the same.
Well, yes and no. A phoneme is an abstract concept that can manifest itself as different allophones. For example, the t sounds in top, stop, writer, hat, and button all belong to the phoneme /t/, but they're all pronounced differently (or can be).
If you want the smallest discrete unit of sound, I believe the correct term is phone. Of course, my phonology course was a few years ago, so I might be off.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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No, you have it right, I'm just finishing up a linguistics course and we covered this.
I don't understand why it's important that people pronounce things right anyway. So long as they get the gist of the story why should you care what they call them? I just found out recently I was not pronouncing "Iorek" right from The Golden Compass but it hasn't changed my enjoyment of the book at all. I don't even pronounce it to myself the way the movie does, because I like mine better.
The only place I take care is with Tolkien and that's because HE took such care and the languages were so important to him. And while I'm sure your languages are important to you too, don't try to duplicate what Tolkien did to the extent he did it. Unless you are a supremely gifted linguist on the level that he was, you're likely to fall short. So just include a basic pronunciation guide and leave it up to the readers to puzzle out the rest. They'll be fine, and if they are mispronouncing someone's name it's not the end of the world, not even of a fantasy world. Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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An excellent point, Belle. I was doing it becuase 1) my friend started doing it and I want my work to match and 2) so I'll be internally consistenet myself. While I'm no Tolkien, I do think my made up rules should stay the same through out.
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
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... take care in the naming department. I rather hate encountering fantasy books with outrageous names, because I usually end up abbreviating them to just their initial sound, or sometimes, if it's really weird, just the first letter. A lot of my friends do this too. It can make talking about the work difficult.
Trying to find names that look/sound exotic but still roll of the english tongue easily and can be pronounced by the majority of people is pretty hard to do. Good luck! I hope you have fun, it really is an interesting challenge.
Posts: 247 | Registered: Feb 2007
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I completely agree, DD. The worst, in my opinion, is from Salvatore's Drizzt novels. We refer to the bad guy mastermind as Crin-Cinnabon. And no one can really be afraid that the overlord of tasty pastries will do more than wreck their diet.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: tz pronounced as the ch in the word chick.
?
I'm not sure I understand your confusion. In the word "Tzech", the "tz" is pronounced like the english "ch" in the word check or chick.
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It's just that IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) uses a c with a circumflex or some other diacritic hat to indicate the ch sound.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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Exactly pooka, which is why I'd recommend using the IPA in this context. Most people don't know the IPA very well. Rather than expecting readers to not only learn the phonetics for your naming system but also to learn the IPA is just confusing. It is much simpler to simply relate the phonetics of your fantasy world to common English words.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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quote:for one of my languages, I'm borrowing heavily from K'iche', a South American language descended from Mayan. The letters don't sound quite like an English speaker would expect, so I'm trying to add a pronunciation guide for place names.
So your question is perhaps better directed at her. It is a fair suggestion that rather than providing a pronunciation guide for place names, she should simply spell the K'iche names using common English phonetics. Perhaps, however, she feels that having very foreign looking words adds to the alien flavor she is trying to create. I can see rational arguments either way.
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