What the *scratches head* Tiefling, Eladrin...

[nutluck]

I pronounce Tiefling like the german word for deep (tief) + ling.
I hope IPA Symbols get displayed: [tiːf] + "ling"

Same here thats how i always pronounced it as well.

 

[Orius]

It's what happens when you borrow so many words from so many different languages.

It's not the borrowing that's the problem; it's the words that came out of Middle English themselves and were spelled every which way by the printers right around the same time of the Great Vowel Shift no less. English spelling is a horrible mess sometimes.

At least words borrowed from other languages tend to be consistant, at least when compared with other words from the same language.

 

[DeusExMachina]

Says the man with the Latin handle...

Touché...

Then again Latin did have less exceptions to the rule than French did...

 

[pukunui]

Touché...

Then again Latin did have less exceptions to the rule than French did...

It's not just French. It's all the other languages that got written down by Frenchmen ... So you got things like "Peking", which was always meant to be pronounced "Beijing", but who in the English-speaking world would've known?

English is a pretty funny language, too, though. I just love how the name is spelled "English", but everyone pronounces it "Inglish", and yet it was derived from a group of people called the "Angles".



But I digress.

I've always said "tee-fling". Sounds Germanic, as others have pointed out. "Tye-fling" just sounds ... wrong.

I'm also finding myself saying "ee-lad-drin" quite a bit, although sometimes it comes out "ih-lad-drin".

 

[1of3]

Says the man with the Latin handle...

Latin is democracy. We all have no idea what we're doing. Compare a German, a French and an English speaker speaking Latin. They hardly understand each other.

 

[Pbartender]

It's not just French. It's all the other languages that got written down by Frenchmen ... So you got things like "Peking", which was always meant to be pronounced "Beijing", but who in the English-speaking world would've known?

Or take something closer to home as an example...

The Île d' Ouessant (pronounced "weh-sah", like "croissant" when spoken with a stereotypically heavy French accent) in the English Channel. In England, it's spelled "Ushant", and us pronounced "uh-shent", like "usher".

 

[Keenath]

It's not just French. It's all the other languages that got written down by Frenchmen ... So you got things like "Peking", which was always meant to be pronounced "Beijing", but who in the English-speaking world would've known?

Actually that's more an artifact of the chinese accent, where P and B are virtually the same letter (the only difference even in English is only whether you "puff" the letter -- which is called a 'plosive' in linguist circles); similarly R and L are the same sound (somewhere halfway between the two, actually). The J is actually a hard-j (as in "jelly"), not the soft-j that most people pronounce (as in "beige"), and in the chinese rising-tone it really does sound like a K if you aren't listening carefully. (Actually, most english speakers use the wrong J sound when they see 'beijing', so one could argue that the K would get a closer approximation out of most people!)

In any case, the transliteration of asian langauges is always difficult because they use a number of sounds we don't have in english -- It's few Americans or Europeans who can properly say the common Vietnamese last name, "Nguyen".

So Beijing is less an effect of french people or the english tongue, and more just trying to pronounce sounds you never heard as a baby. Your brain's language center actually dumps the ability to detect sounds that aren't used in the language(s) you learn when you're under 5 years old -- you hear them, but your language center doesn't process them as particles of speech, so learning to reproduce them is difficult -- and more akin to learning to sing than learning a new word (that is, it activates a different area of the brain). This fact is why people who speak english as a second language will never lose their accent (or not without a long and difficult speech therapy process); their brain simply doesn't recognize some of the sounds.

English is a pretty funny language, too, though. I just love how the name is spelled "English", but everyone pronounces it "Inglish", and yet it was derived from a group of people called the "Angles".

Eh. Vowel shifting is the most common way for a language to evolve over time. Between 1200 and 1600, english traded almost all of its vowels to other sounds, going from the standard latinate vowels (a=ah, e=eh, i=ee, o=oh, u=oo) to the bizarre current system where various vowels sound different in different situations. (In latin, if you want one of the other sounds, you combine two of the basic vowels -- the long I, as in "strike", would be 'ai', for example, rather than shown by adding a silent-e. "Straik". And nobody would say "strayk", because we'd never have heard of using long-vowel sounds when a vowel is followed by another vowel.)

For that matter, the California "valley" accent and the "Southern" accent are the result of vowel shifts.

But I digress.

Heh, yeah, sorry. I've always had an interest in etymology (that is, where words come from), and pronunciation is part of that.

I'm also finding myself saying "ee-lad-drin" quite a bit, although sometimes it comes out "ih-lad-drin".

I'm pretty sure it should actually be pronounced with a short-e at the beginning, and the accent on the first syllable -- "EL-ah-drin" -- where the last syllable rhymes with "fin".

 

[pukunui]

Actually that's more an artifact of the chinese accent, where P and B are virtually the same letter (the only difference even in English is only whether you "puff" the letter -- which is called a 'plosive' in linguist circles); similarly R and L are the same sound (somewhere halfway between the two, actually). The J is actually a hard-j (as in "jelly"), not the soft-j that most people pronounce (as in "beige"), and in the chinese rising-tone it really does sound like a K if you aren't listening carefully. (Actually, most english speakers use the wrong J sound when they see 'beijing', so one could argue that the K would get a closer approximation out of most people!)

Fair enough. That was a bad example (I don't even know if the French had anything to do with Peking/Beijing. They were more into southeast Asia, like Vietnam and stuff ... but I do remember learning something in my Chinese history class about how the old "Anglicization" of Chinese words was done by Frenchmen and that was why nothing was pronounced the way it looked but that the "modern Anglicization" of Chinese words, while still not spot on, is better for an English speaker.

In any case, the transliteration of asian langauges is always difficult because they use a number of sounds we don't have in english -- It's few Americans or Europeans who can properly say the common Vietnamese last name, "Nguyen".

If it's anything like Maori, then I shouldn't have any trouble. Try saying "Ngaruawahia" out loud.

Eh. Vowel shifting is the most common way for a language to evolve over time. Between 1200 and 1600, english traded almost all of its vowels to other sounds, going from the standard latinate vowels (a=ah, e=eh, i=ee, o=oh, u=oo) to the bizarre current system where various vowels sound different in different situations. (In latin, if you want one of the other sounds, you combine two of the basic vowels -- the long I, as in "strike", would be 'ai', for example, rather than shown by adding a silent-e. "Straik". And nobody would say "strayk", because we'd never have heard of using long-vowel sounds when a vowel is followed by another vowel.)

Right. I wasn't complaining. I'm a big fan of the English language. As I said, I think it's funny. That doesn't mean I don't know why it's that way or anything.

I'm pretty sure it should actually be pronounced with a short-e at the beginning, and the accent on the first syllable -- "EL-ah-drin" -- where the last syllable rhymes with "fin".

I dunno. Pronouncing it your way just comes across as too force. It doesn't roll of my tongue like that. Putting the "l" at the beginning of the second syllable just seems more natural to me.

 

[Keenath]

Fair enough. That was a bad example (I don't even know if the French had anything to do with Peking/Beijing. They were more into southeast Asia, like Vietnam and stuff ... but I do remember learning something in my Chinese history class about how the old "Anglicization" of Chinese words was done by Frenchmen and that was why nothing was pronounced the way it looked but that the "modern Anglicization" of Chinese words, while still not spot on, is better for an English speaker.

Eh, not really. Wade-Giles translation was developed by two Brits. It's not perfect, but it was adequate.

The Pinyin system was created for two reasons. First, it was an attempt to standardize pronunciations among the many Chinese dialects themselves -- to get all the many Chinese groups to have a standard way to speak Mandarin Chinese. Second, there was, in the socialist republic, a feeling that they shouldn't use a system created by a westerner, so they made up their own system.

It's not perfect either -- you get an awful lot of bizarre letter choices, because the people who wrote the system didn't actually speak the language they were trying to represent. For example, "shaolin" in W-G is written as "xaolin" in pinyin -- no english speaker would have said X is pronounced as "sh"...