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No such problems, when your native language uses phonetic alphabet! Is the pronounciation like the author intended then? Likely not, but you can still pronounce every word, without having to think.
haha I’m the same with Hungarian :) Finno-Ugric high five!
Let go of ma buddy Drizzle Fo’Shizzle!
The worst is when you read a book or series when you’re young and pronounce it in your mind one way. Then they make a movie or something and it’s pronounced very different, and you end up just staying mad about it every time you hear the other version.
I was like this with ‘aes sedai’ in Wheel of Time. Apparently the ‘aes’ is meant to be pronounced as “eyez”, but for me it’s “ace” 🤷
Hogfather.
Teatime.
Pronounced:
“Teh AH tim eh.”
Terry took the time to type that.
The actor in the movie? (Marc Warren)
“Tee a TIME ay”
He and the movie are otherwise quite good, Michelle Dockery is excellent, but it irks me.
Get out of my fucking head.
My personal favorite is when you think your brain is pronouncing a coherent guess at it until the first time you try to say it aloud and realize your folly.
I find this weirdly sad. I always tried to understand the name of the character and how it may be pronounced (I’m seriously going to include a glossary with IPA for all proper nouns if I ever produce anything for real publication). To me it’s a part of the world-building and I almost recoil at just replacing it with nonsense.
I really appreciated Christopher Paolini including dictionaries in the backs of his books.
All the elvish in the appendices couldn’t save Gary the Eagle.
I’m French Canadian and we used to read Archie as a bathroom rag and I’d rather not say how I pronounce Jughead and Weatherbee even still to this day. On another note I remember being happily surprised Drizzt had a cameo in the original Baldur’s Gate ii game. My friend said you could scum save and roll stealing his very powerful swords. Never took the time to do it though (wasn’t a thief).
zhu’khei?
I can’t even speculate on Weatherbee haha.
Ah yes, Menzobananazan
A surface dwelling dark elf society that’s established a sizeable banana empire in the tropics of Faerun.
There’s always money in the Menzobananazan, Michael
You have no idea how hard it was to end up here and not there. No idea, Michael.
Pans to the Aztec Tomb
toddlers have it figure it out, just call them nana and move on
I listened to the audio books, so I can pronounce it but I can’t spell it
I read the first few Wheel of Time books, then got the audio books for the next 8 or so, and when I first made the switch, I spent a good quarter of a book having to re-learn who all of the characters were, since I’d been mentally mispronouncing so many of them.
I read the books 4ish times. 1st time, RJ died so I took a few years off and read it start to finish on my 2nd attempt. Another couple years pass, and I got to book 10 and couldn’t do the hunt for Falie again. Stopped. My last attempt was last year. I got to book 4, and then my kid got a PS5 for christmas. I was a real gamer back in the day, and I read all day at work, so I just stopped. I don’t read recreationally at all now. It’s kind of like how the last thing a chef wants to do when they get home is cook.
Anyway, there’s no way in hell that I’d ever pronounce the names right. Some of the more intuitive ones, maybe, but the rest? I’d probably blunder.
Arguably the worst book in the series is 10. I got slagged for 4 years at that point until surrendering to the audiobook. It felt like a disjointed midpoint with nowhere to go. So, feel you on just abandoning joy because quitting wasn’t an option.
Eye of the World as an audiobook sounds horrible. I’ve always assumed Jordan brought books 1-3 to a publisher and that’s how the series got published.
Her-me-own
Damn, I’ve gaslit myself with the movie pronunciation that I forgot how high school me would’ve pronounced. Maybe back then I was just giddy to see a book I loved reading on the silver screen.
“Oh you mean hermi-one?”
Hermes One to Hermes Actual, do you read me?
This is ground control to Magus Tom
The first time I tried to pronounce ‘Hermione’ outloud, I somehow ended up with ‘Her-Moyn’.
This is the proper pronunciation.
Heck this is me, but I added an extra -ee to the end too
And then you listen to the audiobook and realize it’s just a super fucked up way of spelling steve
He had to be localized with “r” and “zz” interchanged in Russian due to “drist” root being related to diarrhea.
(But not unpronounceable)
When you talk with someone about that book you’ve both read and realize that you both have a very different pronunciation of a character’s name.
Harkonnen?
I’ve heard that people who were born completely deaf can read much faster than hearing people, because they don’t have to pronounce the words in their head in order to process them.
Thom.
Is it “tom” or do I make a TH sound, so it sorta sounds like “thumb?” 🤔
Me and my friends all had different ways of pronouncing Egwene.
I feel like the author just misspelled Ewgene trying to make it a fantasy version of Eugene.
Apparently her name came from Guinevere from the legends of King Arthur (also al’Thor = Arthur)
I read through Wheel of Time twice and still don’t know whether to pronounce the th in Thom. Thank you Robert Jordan
