How do you pronounce "Drow"?

How do you pronouce "Drow"?

  • As rhyming with "go"

    Votes: 81 16.1%
  • As rhyming with "cow"

    Votes: 395 78.4%
  • Both ways

    Votes: 23 4.6%
  • Neither way

    Votes: 5 1.0%


log in or register to remove this ad

i completely agree. drow(cow) sounds weak and frail to me, whereas drow(oh) sounds devious(spelling :p) and powerful..

So drow rhyming with "cow" sounds weak and frail but drow rhyming with "hoe" sounds powerful? ;-)

I always pronounced it the first way, no idea why I chose that method the first time I said the word out loud.

In reality both are wrong anyway, the proper way to pronounce Drow rhymes with "Mary Sue". Geez, everyone knows that.
 


Yaarel

He Mage
Huh.

‘Drow’ is a Scottish word. A variant of Scots ‘trow’.

According to the Scots language, it is pronounced [drʌu].

As such, the Scots term sounds somewhat in between American English ‘crow’ and ‘cow’.



Interestingly, in the Scots language, Scots ‘drow’ [drʌu] rhymes with neither Scots ‘craw’ [krɑ] (English ‘crow’), nor Scots ‘coo’ [ku] (English ‘cow’).



The upshot is, Americans never pronounce the word ‘drow’ properly, the way Scots do, because American English gets the vowels wrong.

So, the American pronunciation is whichever way Americans want it to sound for Americans.

As such, the American English ‘drow’ rhyming with ‘cow’, seems to prevail. Albeit, rhyming with ‘crow’ is a significant variant.



My first D&D group rhymed it with ‘crow’. (Heh, this same group pronounces Irish ‘shillelagh’ properly!) So that is how I first pronounced it. But these days, I find myself rhyming it with ‘cow’.

Heh. That said, my dialect of American English is strongly monopthongal. (‘Mayonaise’ sounds more like [menez].) So, if I am paying attention, the way that I say ‘cow’ and ‘drow’, sounds more like [kʌ] and [dɹʌ].

This monothong [ʌ] is a (non-centralized) unrounded mid-open back vowel.
 
Last edited:


Tallifer

Hero
Drow are not real, so I think we can pronounce the word any way we feel like. Or spell it any way as well. After all, spelling was compeletly flexible before the 19th century (and still changes). For a good example, see Thomas Malory's le Morte d'Arthur from the 15th century.
 

Remove ads

Top