Words are hard!

[Rogue Agent]

Probably not as many that pronounce Circe the same way, instead of "Kir ke".

The OED lists both seltic and keltic as acceptible pronunciations of Celtic, but only ser-see as the pronunciation of Circe.

The word which gave me trouble for the longest time was Halcyon. It was one of those words that I just took a run at when I was 10 and then didn't ever actually read the letters again for about 30 years! I used to say Hal - e - con rather than Hal - sea - on

I did the same thing, but ended up pronouncing it hall-kee-on. (Which, ironically, would put it closer to the original Greek.)

Ah for me it was Cimmerian as in "Conan the Cimmerian". I always wanted to pronounce it as Kimmerian - after all it is Konan!

The other half of that is my pet peeve: People who pronounce Conan as Co-NAHN because they saw the Schwarznegger movie. It's (a) an actual name that isn't pronounced like that and (b) Howard didn't pronounce it like that, either. Cut it out.

 

[Dordledum]

Argh!

I've got the good luck to play with a few linguists, so I hope our use of the English language isn't that bad for non-native speakers.

The only one I'm still not sure about is lich. is it "lik" or is it "litsj"?

And a few funny ones:

- some girl player pronouncing rapier as raper
- our dm talking about the fudge plane (meaning fugue)

 

[Gilladian]

Awesome poem! I had fun reading it aloud to my kids. What's the source?

The Chaos - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Will Doyle]

That's perfectly modern British English. It's not "Auld English" or "COOL!", it's how 63-million of us spell the word. Including, presumably, Bioware (I don't know if Canada uses that spelling or not).

You are clearly living in a parallel universe, Morrus, because we don't spell it like that in my Britain.

 

[Will Doyle]

The only one I'm still not sure about is lich. is it "lik" or is it "litsj"?

I had a professor tell me that it was pronounced "lick". After a while though, I shifted back to calling it "litch", simply because everyone else pronounces it like that and I was getting sick of the confused looks.

 

[Scott DeWar]

what the fun of parallel pronunciations like live - short i and long I !!

 

[theredrobedwizard]

I'd only ever heard the word Sigil pronounced "sig-ill" until about 8 years ago when my friend Aaron was playing Planescape: Torment and went on a tirade because they pronounced "sij'ill" wrong.

I believe my logic "It's got a G in it, why wouldn't it logically be pronounced sig-ill?".

It's the same argument I have with .GIF images. Giff, not jiff. It's an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format and since the word Graphics is pronounced with a hard G, then the acronym should be as well.

I have a lot of problems with Antediluvian (from V:tM). My buddy Adam (one of the higher ranking STs for Masquerade LARP) pronounces it "Anti-dull-ih-van", I pronounce it "ahn-tay-DIE-loo-vee-an".

Also, count me among the people who didn't know that gaol was pronounced similar to jail. There were many an enemy GAH-oh-lers.

 

[Zhaleskra]

There's the whole "drow" thing (is it like cow, or is it like bro).

I don't take players, DMs, or the race seriously if I hear "dro".

A few words that trip me up over and over are:

chasm - If it is "kasm" then get rid of the h! It confuses me.

With you here, silent letters that don't distinguish one word from another are a waste of space. For that matter, if you do need a silent letter for that purpose, think of another way of spelling that word. Comb to coum perhaps?

brazier - My temples are quite interesting with all of the "candlebras" and "brassieres" lying around.

I'm pretty sure there's a 2e source that made a joke about this.

portcullis - My tongue gets twisted when I try to say this, so they are always open.

Break up the syllables: Port-cull-iss

for me Scythe.

I always pronounce it "Sith" instead of sithe (like writhe).

Speaking of silent letters, why does scythe even have a C? It does nothing for the pronunciation. On an art site, I saw it spelled incorrectly, thought about the mistake, then realized what I just said in the previous sentence.

That is the correct way to pronounce it if you're going to spell it like that. The way you're "supposed to" pronounce would be spelled "Sighil". It's not my fault that The Lady of Pain is apparently illiterate.

It's a pseudo-medieval neutral ground. People spelled things however they wanted back in the real middle ages. This made a lot of people very angry because people were spelling the same words different ways, and thus dictionaries were born.

People who pronounce Conan as Co-NAHN because they saw the Schwarznegger movie.

Although as far as I can tell, it was only the actor who played him in the recent movie: Co-NUN from a segment of that preview.

 

[Thotas]

Gaol took me a while to figure out, it's been long ago enough that I don't know where I first ran into it or how long I was wrong about it or how I did finally catch on.

I know "mee-lee" is wrong, but I don't like the correct version. Bad allergies have my sinuses and such usually messed up in ways that make a lot of correct francophonics physically uncomfortable for me to say.

And "any japanese word whatsoever"? Easiest language in the world on that score, from what I know.

 

[Thotas]

It's a pseudo-medieval neutral ground. People spelled things however they wanted back in the real middle ages. This made a lot of people very angry because people were spelling the same words different ways, and thus dictionaries were born.

In that spirit, as per Fifth Element's point when he quoted that post, I shall from now on refer to said city as "Throatwarbler mangrove".