How do you pronounce them?
 

These are my guesses. I hope the devs will respond.

Abysia: Ah-biss-ee-ah
Atlantis: At-lan-tiss
Pythium: Pith-ee-um
Man: lol
Ulm: heheh
C'tis: Seh-Tiss
Arcoscephale: Arr-Kose-Keh-Fale
Caelum: Kay-Lum
Ermor: Err-More
Marignon: Marig-non
Pangaea: Pan-jee-ah
Vanheim: Van-heem
Jotunheim: Joh-Tun-Heem
R'lyeh: have no clue
Mictlan: Mick-tlan
T'ien Ch'i: Tyen-Chee
Machaka: Mah-chaka


So Devs, what do you think?

[ November 27, 2003, 00:11: Message edited by: Argitoth ]

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Id go with Arrr-kosee-Fale (the sc seems just s to me)
<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Pan-jay-ah
Van-hime
Jotun-hime

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Arr-lee-ah

[quote]
Mictlan: Mick-tlan
T'ien Ch'i: Tyen-Chee
Machaka: Mah-chaka
QUOTE]

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

Pangaea I pronounce

"Pan-gee-uh"

or

"Pan-gay-ah"

But that is from the root word on both of them.

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

Edit: stupid thing takes out my brackets.

Abysia: ah-BISS-ee-ah

C'tis: k (glottal stop) TISS

Arcoscephale: ARR-kos-seh-PHAH-leh (but you're probably right that the 'c' should be hard)

Marignon: mar-ee-NYONH (nh being nazalized n)...this is France, after all

Pangaea: pan-GAY-ah

Vanheim: VAN-haym

R'lyeh: rrr (glottal stop) lll YEH (easy http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif )

[ November 27, 2003, 01:05: Message edited by: Raen ]

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

Daione Sidhe?

Daoine - tay-own? thay-own? . . . ?
Sidhe - shee

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">DEE-nah SHEE.

The Celtic Languages may be the most beautiful there ever were. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">DEE-nah SHEE.
</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I was just off checking my CJ Cherryh collection for her view which is very close to yours:
"thee na Shee"

She states that the word means "the People of Peace . . . Often powers felt to be dangerous and perhaps ill-wishing are named by names quite contrary to their nature." She goes on to say that the term Sidhe can be used for many kinds of creatures but the Daoine Sidhe are the highest of their kind. This is a somewhat different take on the Sidhe to the approach of Illwinter but stil informative.

Cheers

Keir

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

The way I say the ones that are different.
Arcoscephale: Arr-Ko-Sef-ah-lee
Marignon: Mare-in-yon (French nasal sounding end)
Vanheim: Van-hime
Jotunheim: Joh-Tun-Hime
R'lyeh: Rye-luh, but err-la-yay could also work

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

I don't know who CJ Cherryh is, but her view is incorrect.

Gaelic Languages inflect the prefix for case, so your example of "thee na shee" would likely mean something like "of Daione Sidhe." DEE-nah SHEE is the nominative.

The spelling to incorporate what you suggest would be "Dhaione Sidhe." (note the 'h')

Fact remains, only Erse and Scots Gaelic can win the prize for obscure spellings of beautiful words http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif .

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

C'tis: Sih-tiss
Arcoscephale: Ar-co-seh-fah-lee (or possibly ar-co-se-fail)
Caelum: Kaye-Lum (kaye as in "aye" or "eye")
Marignon: Mar-ij-non (I always say "Marjinon", though)
Pangaea: Pan-jee-yuh
Vanheim: Van-hiym (long "i", like "hi" with an "m")
Jotunheim: Joh-tun-hiym
R'lyeh: Rye-lee (like the name Riley; could be rye-leh, though)
T'ien Ch'i: Tee-yen Chee (longer stop between the two words)

Otherwise, I agree with Argitoth.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I've studied too much Japanese. The way I would pronounce your phonetic spellings are "Van-hee-may" and "Joh-tun-hee-may" http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

[ November 27, 2003, 02:58: Message edited by: Saber Cherry ]

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I'd go for: R-lee, IMO no vowel between 'R' and 'l'. It's kinda hard to pronounce (like "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!", any pronouciation guides?)... Then again, I'm not a native speaker of R'lyehian(?) or english... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

- Humer

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">CJ Cherryh is a history lecturer turned fantasy sci fi writer who produces, IMO, the best Sidhe inspired fantasy I have read.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">You may well be right but I'm cautious of your certainty as I'm not sure the pronunciation of Daoine Sidhe is something a modern person can be sure of. This might account for the fact that you and CJ have different pronunciation despite both being knowledgeable about your subject.

I've just been reading up on the Celts after having been told the Picts were Celts - they were probably the amalgamen of a previous people with a small Celtic conquering overlay later reinforced by the merging of the Scots (ie Celts from Ireland) and the Picts. The thing that came through out of my reading is that the Celts were a dynamic sub-group of the peoples occupying central Europe around ~1000 BC who split off and went a conquering establishing themselves as a warrior aristocracy dominating other peoples. As such their myths and legends have influenced and been influenced by many different cultures as has the language which evolved many sub branches.

Although I am of primarily Celtic origin I have a caution about the Celtic thing as its a bit of fashion to applaud the Celtic achievements and accredit them with the achievements of others. According to many Celt enthusiastic authors the Celts were the inspiration for everybody at the time. However the Celts were a peripheral group to the then center of civilisation (the near east/eastern mediterrainen) so this is unlikely. If you study the Bronze Age mediterrain you will read that supposidly Celtic designs were in fact slight modifications of earlier imports from Crete as the trade for Tin (crucial in making bronze and very rare in the Near East) meant large amounts of goods produced in the mediterrain found there way north and west into Celtic and other hands. If you look at the armour and weapons of Anatolia around the time of the Trojan War and the subsequent Sea Peoples conquests some of them could be Celtic warriors. Hardly suprising since many of these Sea Peoples ended up going west and amongst other things were possibly responsible for founding Rome and bringing a higher level of culture to much of the western mediterrainian basin and in turn influencing the emerging Celts. Its not impossible that the impetuos that created the Sea Peoples had its reflection in the emergence of the Celts or even that descendents of a branch of the Sea Peoples played a role in the emergence of the Celts as a dynamic force.

As an example of how this can work it is postulated that Mycaenean Greek culture emerged after a Greek prince/mercenery fled the defeat of the Hyksos occupation of Egypt with his Hysos princess wife, many retainers, craftsmen and much wealth. The most impressive Mycaenean grave finds are at the very start of the first dynasty of rulers and reminsicent of Egyptian and Hyksos work. So just as bands of Celts came to dominate many other cultures and inject a new dynamism in them it is likely that the begining of Celtic dynamism had an external ingredient.

It is a fascinating period of history in which great progress is being made due to the ongoing translation of Hititte writings and the recent finds such as that of the Royal Library of the original ruling House of Carchemesh. This survived the sack by the Hittites as the Palace feel on top of it.

I really have wandered off the topic - but I am fascinated by this period as it feeds into so much.

Cheers

Keir

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

My favourite cuthullu mad Game Master prononucies it "ril-ee-a" - this is at least easy to say. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

Doesn't anybody else speak any French here? Look at all the people who are massacring Marignon.

I mean, how do you pronounce Champagne.

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

Ar-kos-kef-ah-leh - the word has a Greek sound to it. Cephale (Kefale) means head in Greek.

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

Arcoscephale: Arko-ske-FAH-LEH
R'lyeh: RI-ly-EH (and the y is a separate sound in Finnish, much like in 'system', but more pronounced. Try pronouncing 'oo', but at the front of your mouth instead of at the back)
Jotunheim: Yo-TUN-hime
Vanheim: Van-HIME
Ermor: Err-MORR
Abysia: Aby-SIA (again the Finnish y)
C'tis: k (glottal stop) TISS
Caelum: Ca-e-LUM (the ae is pronounced together, the Finnish spelling would be Cae-lum, with a diftong in the first syllable)
Marignon: Mar-ing-NYON
Machaka: Mah-CHA-kah
T'ien Chi: T(glottal stop, but can be omitted) ien TSHEE (or alternatively Khee)
Pythium: Pyy-THIUM (y is Finnish again, and long, sort of like in python, not the why y)

Edi

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I'm French, and would pronounce it Mar-ee-NYON
(with a nasal ON in the end, but there's no English word that has this sound AFAIK)

Antway - the Marignon nation looks rather Spanish to me (with the Spanish Inquisition and all). Hey, in DomI Marignon was located in Catalogne when using the "Europa" map, IIRC.

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

The inquisition of Marignon is a conglomerate of the original inquisition od Provence and the spanish one. Friars had a great role in the hunt for the cathars in langue d'oc, but the witch hunters and inquisitors of Marignon are perhaps later and more spanish.

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I pronounce it Mar-ee-nyon to as I don't knwo any spanish and it looks a french name to me.

Its funny the whole pronunciation thing - I went the Greece ~5 years ago after a life time of reading creek history myths and legends and discovered I was completely wrong in my idea of how the words were said. What I was pronouncing as a soft "c" was acutally a hard "K". It reinforced the point to me the Greek culture has alwyas been more middle eastern than european and its made quite a difference to my feel for greek culture. Likewise I used to pronouce Sidhe "sid-hay" and changing to saying it "shee" has altered my feel for the race.

cheers

Keir

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">A strange statement. Why would something like writing Greek words in anglicized way mean that? In fact, it's not as much anglicized as adopted from Latin, and classic Latin pronounciation of "c" was also "k". Hence, the letter "kappa" became "c" in many words taken from Greek. But other "European" Languages also have the sound "k" present in many of their word pronounciations, so why would this be a determining feature?

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

We pronounce the names as swedish as possible.

Kristoffer, who is the principal originator of the nations their flavour and their names, had words or names from different cultures in mind when he made most of the nations, but that doesn't mean that he or anybody else around here bothers to pronounce them in the 'correct way' suggested by the language that the name originated from, this is partly due to that we chatter quite a bit about dominions and after a while the names etc tends to get swedified. Since Vanheim and Jotunheim are the two nation whose names are Scandinavian in origin these are probably the only ones that we pronounce somewhat similarily to their etymological roots. C'tis and a few others do not really have any etymological roots so I guess our colliqual swedish pronounciation is the 'correct' one for those. But Illwinter and its associates are not particularily good at linguistics, or particularily interested.

If you still think that the 'correct' pronounciation is important you might try to reconstruct it from the cultures that the nations are derived from or inspired by, in all likelyhood your guess at the 'correct' greek pronounciation of Pangaea is as good or better than ours, if you are chinese I wouldn't dream of trying to teach you how to pronounce Tien Chi in a believable way, and so on.

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

I pronounce them in a blunt Finnish manner, or even worse, use nicknames like "tikseli".

For example, i never bother to say "Arcoscephale".

[ November 28, 2003, 11:36: Message edited by: Nerfix ]

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Not a determing feature just one of the things that hit me very early - the language was pronounced nothing like I could imagine looking at the words. I speak English, German and a bit of French and nothing in this has prepared me for the way Greeks spoke Greek. Simple things like Mykanae instead of Mycanae, Aleskander rather than Alexander. Perhpas to you this is normal but to me it was new.

Obviously food, customs, architecture, clothing, landscape, all played a role in adjusting my picture of greece. I'm aware this does not tell me what ancient greece was like but it helps.

Flying by day from Singapore to London and tracing Alexanders route through the desert to India and the locations of the ancient civilisations of the euprharates/tigris rivers and Anatolia was likewise a revelation. Living in NZ these things are very far away and a book cannot convey it all.

So I'm not seeking to define Greek culture by the hard "K" it was just one of the things that hit me.

Cheers

Keir

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

I would guess that German pronounciation of the Greek words tend to be more similar to the authentic Greek one, as English as a language tends to warp a lot of the words due to the differences in the way the words are written and pronounced.
In any case, Greek seem very European to me. Not western or northern European, but eastern European for sure (nothing like England, that's certain, but Europe doesn't stop there either). I guess that is not what you had in mind when you were thinking about the "Europeans" in general.

In any case, I'm not trying to offend, I was just wondering what brought you to that conclusion. As an insider, it's interesting when you hear such comments about something what you take for granted. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

Just on a side note for those who are curious, daoine is the plural for duine in Modern Irish. (And, yeah, I know there's more than one flavour of Gaelic. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif This is just the only one I can speak upon with any education.) It means, quite simply, "people".

Oh, and it should indeed be pronounced "DEE-nah" if using Modern Irish. The exact pronunciation of Old Irish is an academic hot potato, so good luck finding a definitive answer there! Just be aware that the word is something that is still a part of the modern Irish language and thus has a very certain pronunciation there.

Sidhe literally refers to the rounded hills that act as gateways of a sort to the Otherworld, where the Children of Anu (the Tuatha de Danaan) were forced to take up residence. (Please forgive the gross over-simplification here!!!) It came to be a synonym for those people as well, and would actually be a much better choice than Tuatha for referring to the fey folk and their kith.

(Tuatha is just a word to refer to people from a certain region or area, such as in fear tuathe or "countryman", and is in no way specific to the people called the Tuatha de Danaan. A tuath is a kind of political division, but also refers to the people in that division or to any group of regionally related folk in general. Its use in Tuatha de Danaan is just to express that they are "of Danu"/"Anu" and is kind of clumsy to pick out as a specific proper name.)

So, literally, Daoine Sidhe means "hill people". As pointed out though, the hills in question are something special, so there is much more meaning there beyond the literal. Ermor's Wailing Lady, the bean sidhe or Banshee, gets her name from the same place. (Bean simply means "woman".)

Cherryh is a very knowledgeable woman, and somebody I respect quite a bit, but she does tend to gloss a bit. It's hard (if not impossible) not to do, given the complexity of the material and the vast differences between it and the more familiar (to most people) Greco-Roman matter. Other names given to the same people, such as the "fey (fair) folk", were given despite the fear held for them, either for direct contrast or as a form of appeasement. That's the sort of thing she is referring to; it isn't present in Daoine Sidhe, but IS present in some of the other names for the Sidhe.

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

I read the Posts that led to the demise of the cthulu newsgroup on usenet- the pronunciation of R'lyeh. Among those that I saw, my favorite was:

urrll-yeh

where the urrll... part sort of sounds like a choking squid. It's fun to say, and makes people think you're suffering from indigestion when you bring it up in polite conversation.

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Psitticine, I no longer have my old language books -- what's the possessive (genitive) plural of duine and how is it pronounced?

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

It's the same as the nominative plural: daoine.

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">As I understand recent archaeological findings have been expanding the role and range of the Celts in history. For example their role in the production and trade of salt, where they developed techniques that were copied by the Romans, who were quite into salt. At least that's what I gleaned from "Salt: A World History" by Mark Kurlansky -- an absolutely fascinating read.

The Celts main weakness seems to have been that they weren't really very good at warfare, and simply got conquered and absorbed by the Romans and Nomadic migrants.

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I'm French, and would pronounce it Mar-ee-NYON
(with a nasal ON in the end, but there's no English word that has this sound AFAIK)

Antway - the Marignon nation looks rather Spanish to me (with the Spanish Inquisition and all). Hey, in DomI Marignon was located in Catalogne when using the "Europa" map, IIRC. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Hey Phil, Marignon isn't really pronounced "Marinion", you forgot our (I'm French too) nasal "gn".
In fact only Frenchmen can pronounce it http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
Arco definitely is "arkoskefalè", R'lyeh should NOT EVER be pronounced http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif .
I suppose the Norse nations should be pronounced as in German ;
Vanheim => Fan-haïm ?
Jotunheim => Iotoun-haïm ?
Some norsemen here ? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: How do you pronounce them?
 

I would say also that Marignon is a twist on Marignan, so is a reference to the France of Henry IV. But thats perhaps my imagination.


Pocus, French too.