Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Challenge: unpronounceable

This is part of the weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. If you'd like to participate, you can find the prompts here. They also put up a post every Wednesday where you go and link your response -- and see everyone else's. Check out their homepage to find it.

The challenge for this week is "character names in books I can't pronounce", and I have to admit that the first thing that comes to mind is this opening from Robert Jordan regarding certain characters in the Wheel Of Time books:


But... I did it to myself in the Great Unpublished Pulp Fantasy Novel that I wrote back when I could actually get things finished. The main character was easy: called himself Cat, refused to admit that he might have a real name, was even listed in the records at his school as Cat.

But his best friend was a young woman named Gin... with a hard G. There is literally no way to spell that in English so people won't automatically assume that it's pronounced "jin". There is no casual way to work the pronunciation issue into the dialogue. And there was no possibility of changing her name; she was Gin, and she damned well wasn't going to go by anything else -- and would probably put an arrow into you on general principles if you asked her to.

So... yeah. If there's a moral to this story, I have yet to find it -- but I still scoff when people try to tell me that English is a phonetic language. English is an unutterable mess, that's what it is, and it's amazing that anybody manages to communicate in it at all.

Update: Cathryn Hein reminded me of another example, so I'm copying my response here.

I do not, for the record, remember the title, author, series, or really much of anything else except this:

1. It was a fairly generic high fantasy setting -- elves, dwarves, humans, roughly medieval technology, etc. -- that could have come out of virtually any D'n'D game.

2. Except, all the racial names had apostrophes added. All. Of. Them. So there were dwa'rves, cen'taurs, me'erfolk, and I believe even e'elves. And I have no idea how that sounded in the author's head, but when I see an apostrophe in the middle of a word I automatically assume it's representing a glottal stop, a fact which turns perfectly easy names into an unholy mess of pronunciations, even in my head.

3. I did not finish the book.

15 comments:

  1. German is phonetic. Spanish is phonetic. Even Romanian is pretty phonetic. English? English is a damn hot mess. LOL!

    But I do love this story, however!

    My post

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    1. I mean, it's phonetic as opposed to, say, using hieroglyphs for words; it's just horrifyingly inconsistent about it!

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  2. Love the debate on English. Refer to the year 1066 when German, Danish, Old English, French and Latin combined into our modern day language. It's linguistic goulash. https://pmprescott.blogspot.com/2020/07/character-names-in-books-i-cant.html

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    1. "Linguistic goulash," I love it. It really is.

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  3. I totally agree with you regarding the English language. Great post, Michael.

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  4. I've been tutoring tweens and pre-teens in grammar for many years. Most of them were born here, but their parents came from India, so they speak at least one Indian language also--so they can communicate with their grandparents. English has the most words of any language--it has over 60,000 words. The next closest language is German, and they have 30,000 words. Why does English have so many? We co-opt words from every other language in the world! But when we steal their words, we steal their way to conjugate them also--which makes sense in their language, but not in ours! Why else do we seek knowledge, but yesterday we sought knowledge? "I go lie down on the bed, yesterday I lay down, I have lain down before, and I'm lying down now, But today I lay my book down, yesterday I laid my book down, I have laid my book down before, and I'm laying my book down now. But today I lie to you, yesterday I lied to you, I have lied to you before, and I'm lying to you right now."--This is the kind of thing that makes the kids look at me and say, "Really? This makes sense?" I tell them that English doesn't make any sense at all--I've been an English teacher for over 40 years, so I'm allowed to let them in on that big secret! And let's not even go into idioms, which totally defeat them, because their parents never use any in English! English is the hardest language to learn as a second language! For every rule you learn, there are a myriad of exceptions--which is why I tell them to ignore the rules and just memorize stuff.

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    1. "Read a lot," is my wife's additional advice for that. (She teaches business communications, and a lot of her students are not native to speaking English.)

      My personal favorite example of English Is Weird was when I started letting the boys play some of my video games -- but supervised, because there was "language" in them. So at one point I found myself explaining the difference between your rear (inoffensive), your butt (mildly naughty), and your ass (impolite) -- three very different uses, even though technically they're all referring to the same body part.

      Because English is weird.

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    2. Well, me faither from Glesga called it "yer beh-hook-ie". But my Polish mom called it your "due-pah." I actually went to school knowing how to swear in Polish, since when Mom got mad at me, she'd revert. I never did learn more than swears and food words! LOL.

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  5. When the character tells you this is their name, you can't argue. Good stories!!

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  6. Michael, have you ever seen the TV series The Adventure of English? It's a fantastic and fascinating study of how the language developed and helps explain why it's the mess it is.
    Your Gin character made me smile. They can be strident like that, can't they?

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  7. English is a mess of a language isn't it? And there are so many exceptions to the rules. My students in Japan struggle with that...they like hard and fast rules.

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