I transliterated a bunch of the names for my setting into English and they are close enough, but they also hold up pretty well except when a lot of the more guttural variants get translated. I am bad with the sound pronunciation IPA because I cannot approximate the natural pitch swings. Three syllable names are generally High-low-High for females and Low High Low for males. It took me awhile to get the feel of why names sound and carry meanings in the way that they do - but I think I need to go back and fix a bunch of the transliterations.... I am not happy with my level of English... though I do not force the concept of morae pitch on others when it comes to names. Real life is strange, you can have it written one way and pronounced completely differently. Your name may be 'Cat' and it is read 'Kate' (or Katelynn) unless you want a coffee pot thrown your way.
Well this whole thread has given some thought to one of my character's names. Marcia Lucia's Chinese name is "Si Hoar" (Western Flower), pronounced She Hwar, However, when her consort beats her, he accuses her of being a Da Qin (Roman) whore, and the possibility of an inadvertent pun just occurred to me. I think I will change the spelling to Si Huar, to catch that. Most of the time, I think name pronunciation means nothing, but in this case it could stimulate an inadvertent giggle factor.
So you do not realize the possibility of it being read as "She whore" in the first place? Most people do not realize the difference between "Hoary" as is...
I used to fret a lot over my sci-fi characters' names being mispronounced and wrote out extensive pronunciation guides, including even characters whose names were pretty easily-understood. I like guides (I also like maps and such, that's just me), and I wouldn't toss a book away for having one or having difficult names, but in my stuff I just don't consider it a priority anymore. I figure exact pronunciation isn't important to understanding and enjoying a story. You see a collection of letters and go "ah right, that one person" and that's all that matters, imo. I do have a sub-species of people with their own unique language that was adapted from a language spoken by non-organics, and it's a widely acknowledged pain in the ass for organic types to use with their flappy meat mouths, so at various points characters struggle to pronounce/understand it. Ultimately, in-universe, the consensus is to go 'screw it' and just pronounce these words to the best of their abilities. Which is kinda how I see the whole thing
My characters Cissa and Cymen sound like Kisser and Hymen. King Cerdic sounds like kinker dick. And I can't change mine.
In my dictionary, Proto-Celtic does not have a V. The V is used a a place holder for the vowels in the same way C is a place holder for a consonant. Ex. *druCid (except we know the missing consonant in that example is a "w".)
My characters are much later period than Proto-Celtic I believe. They speak Common Britonic, it's about a hundred years before it split up into different languages like Welsh, Cornish, etc... They still don't have v's though, you're right.
Amusing but that was correct. I picked it up an on-line Chinese translation, which included the spoken version, which as I said, was "She Khwar" or "She Hwar" depending how guttural the aspirant was. The spoken sound stuck in my brain and I was oblivious to the obvious pun possibility.
Once your book is published it no longer belongs entirely to you, in a way. The story becomes personal to the reader - or so you'd hope! - and as such, we should allow our readers to take ownership of some aspect of it. How they choose to pronounce the names of the characters would be one of them. Besides, how do you suppose you could stop them mispronouncing it anyway? Correct them every time? They'd just forget and you'd only be able to correct those you knew - and you would hope people beyond your circle of friends were reading your book. It's not something you can police, so why bother? I had a character called Morvitus - in my head it's simply as it's spelt: Mor-vi-tus. My friend kept pronouncing it Mor-vie-tus (vie as in tie). I got no clue why, and no amount of my saying it correctly helped change it lol. Personally, I don't care for pronunciation guides. I might skim it but I probably won't read it, especially if it's more than a few lines long. I want a good story - I didn't want some linguistic textbook. If I did, I wouldn't have picked up a novel. I think a guide for one or two most important names, fair enough, and if you make the spelling logical then it would stick. But don't try to tell me "Tree" is really pronouned "Ach-hip-bidee" It won't work!
That's not as bad as Disney's Mulan's male name Now I loved that film, but when she told the captain her name was Fa Ping, I laughed. It is quite literally the way you say "vase" in Cantonese Chinese. You know, a "flower bottle" - vase Or when my parents suggested the Chinese name for my daughter and, not realising how it sounds to the European ear, I told my husband. The name was "Ah-Man" Needless to say the name got scrapped hahaha.
I need a Chinese speaker to go through and scrub my non-historical (most of them) Chinese names for precisely these gotcha's. I did pick names, in general, from modern Chinese names, though the story is set in AD100 Han China... though the pronunciation has changed, no one knows for sure what it was, since the Chinese writing is non-phonetic. The only names I made up from whole cloth was Si HUAR (now) and her brother Si Nuo (Western Bull)... His Latin name is Marcus Lucius Quintus. I think the only historical names I used was the Emperor He himself, his wife the Lady Deng, Ban Chao, his foreign Western Military District commander, Gan Ying, who led the mission to Rome, and the head court eunuch whose name evades me right now, Zhong Zheng, I think. Mentioned exactly once.
I did get an upcheck on the draft book cover. That has a banner with Chinese traditional script on it, compliments of Google Translate. It was supposed to be the (fictional) yellow vertical banner carried by the Gan Ying expedition, which was supposed to be "Western Harmony." Some one confirmed (without knowing that) that it said West and Harmony, Peace or Reconciliation. The dragon curling up the staff, and the eagle standard of the Twelfth Thunderbolt Legion on the other side , make up the "Eagle and the Dragon" of the title, on either side of the contemporary world map of Ptolemy in the middle, with their route on it. A novel of Rome and China.
Google Translate is horrible.... Though @Lew, are not the Go'on readings in Japanese an approximation of the Wu readings from the 5 and 6th centuries? Though, could you not just look them up in Chinese directly. By the way...was the banner 西諴? Or should it be 西和? Just a shot at it.
That doesn't honestly sound like a proper name to me, and besides it sounds exactly like the word Rhino The actual character of "Xi" is different between that for rhino and the west, but you're presumably writing in English which sorta means the distinction is easily lost. Even with the script it'd still be funny - it's how you make fun of people's names after all!
If I read a story with 'real' foreign names in it, I want to know how to pronounce them correctly. I'd love a guide. If the book is fantasy, or the names are made up for some other reason, then I wouldn't bother with the guide. I assume the writer will spell the names as they sound in the language he's using to write with.
If you add a name pronunciation guide to your fantasy book, I'm 99 % sure I won't read it. This is most likely because of the way I read. I don't "hear" or pronounce what I read in my head, as such. I kind of just... see stuff, even dialogue. So when I read dialogue, I'm not all that conscious of the pronunciation of names, or even words as such (unless there's word play that requires it), and it's possible my brain "hears" the names in different ways as I go along. When I was reading His Dark Materials, I'm pretty sure I "pronounced" Lyra's name either exactly as it's spelled or "Lai-ruh." This could be because my mother-tongue is Finnish, so if you throw a name like Calea in front of me, I might pronounce it "kuh-LEH-uh" or "kuh-lee-uh" or your way, but in that case, if I was the author, I wouldn't care how the reader pronounced it unless it was in some way important. Say, Calea's nickname was Cay. She wouldn't be Cay if I pronounced it Kuh-leh-uh, which gives me a clue as to how to pronounce her name and sort of makes it important. Without that clue, I'd give her another nickname, like Cal or Lea. When I was a kid, I read a book with a character called Siobhan whose nickname was Shuv. I didn't get it back then, but I guess if I had stopped and thought about it, I would've realized the nick was a clue to how to pronounce her name if one happened to be unfamiliar with it. I'm reading Mistborn right now and one character is called Lord Renoux. In that case, my brain actually does hear it "Re-nouh" instead of "Re-nou-ks," but again, it probaby doesn't matter to Brandon Sanderson how I hear it/pronounce it. And even if he did care and wanted to correct my brain pronunciation, I'm inclined to think "dude, just be happy I bought the entire trilogy. Money's in the bank and you're dead to me, which means I can see your world, characters, everything, any way I please." However, I could say none of this name pronunciation business affect my impression of the character in any way. Not in any significant, particularly noticeable way I can think of.
Me too. I couldn't think how to put this into words. When I read Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, which must be about a million words long (?) I spent the entire book thinking it was set in a place called Knightsbridge. It was only when I downloaded the audiobook that I realised it was Kingsbridge.
But Knightsbridge is probably a name you're more familiar with 'cause you're from London? So your eyes sort of autocorrect it. With Mistborn, it's interesting how European the names are. Kelsier and Elend sound vaguely German to me. Renoux sounds sort of French. Then there's e.g. Vin, Hammond, and Camon. They're pretty simple names, too, which is my preference in fantasy books, I guess 'cause I don't trip on them. I mean, it's not a huge "problem" if the author has come up with some amazing race with names that look like road signs in Wales., but if you write in English, your audience will for the most part speak English as their first language, it does help the narration flow better and it is easier to remember the names when they're somewhat similar to what you'd find in English. But I'm not vehemently against "weird", fantastical names. Sorry, went off on a bit of a tangent there.
It was just an example of how I don't really read words properly, especially proper nouns. I sort of remember what they look like, so the next time the name comes up I know which character it is. But I could make it through a whole book without being able to tell you the MC's name, just that it began with A, was kinda long and there was an N in there somewhere...
