How do you pronounce them?

[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by PhilD:
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.

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

[HJ]

Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:
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.

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?

[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by HJ:
so why would this be a determining feature?

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

[HJ]

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.

[Psitticine]

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. 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.

[Teleolurian]

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.

[Raen]

Originally posted by Psitticine:
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. 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.

Psitticine, I no longer have my old language books -- what's the possessive (genitive) plural of duine and how is it pronounced?