Member Nicknames

[sajungzak]

As far as the name Juan - the common pronunciation in our area is Wha-an not Yawn. I have never heard of any comparison to a ch sound before and I am curious now to know how Europeans tend to pronounce ch. In north central US it is pronounced as either a soft K sound or as in cheese.

I meant Juan rhymes with yawn. People in the NW say it hwawn. Finally found a recording of what kk was describing. Very subtle ch at the beginning.

[Balinor]

As far as the name Juan - the common pronunciation in our area is Wha-an not Yawn. I have never heard of any comparison to a ch sound before and I am curious now to know how Europeans tend to pronounce ch. In north central US it is pronounced as either a soft K sound or as in cheese.

I meant Juan rhymes with yawn. People in the NW say it hwawn. Finally found a recording of what kk was describing. Very subtle ch at the beginning.

I could see people saying hwawn since Jesus is pronounced Hey-sus in our area when referring to spanish names. In our area the rhyme for Juan would be more like Wand without the hard d sound at the end. I'm not sure if that makes sense but the sound of the A is different from yawn, but only slightly. Or perhaps its the AW in yawn that throws it off a bit. I am by no means a linguist expert.

[Sjeng]

whenever I think of TMU now:

[knightkrawler]

TEMMOO!!

[TMU]

I too thought it was an abbreviation and pronounced each letter individually. Perhaps due to the all caps spelling.

Well, it 's fine with me if that is how you say it, I did it before too, but then I "shortened" it

Actually I like Timoo better if I am pronouncing it correctly now. Ti-moo where the i is like in "hit"? And stressed like Tibet?

Yes, pretty much so if you mean my real name Exept that there is only short "o" at the end

whenever I think of TMU now:

That is more like "timii"

TEMMOO!!

^

[Hero_Of_Retro]

My name, Hero_Of_Retro, is a simple statement, that i am a huge avid collector of the classic! Drawn back to the dungeons by Ye Olde Inn, Hero in the name, that was random, Just like the endless possibilities Hero Quest can allow.

[Big Bene]

Interestingly, only Big Benes pronunciation surprised me, even though I'm German, too. Because of freakin' German orthography.

German orthography is pretty straightforward, compared to English or French (But well, then again, Italian is more straightforward than German for example ). A letter (or combination of letters) always sounds the same, regardles where it stands, whith very few exceptions. But I would be interested how you pronounce my nick, please tell!

And yeah, -ch is not -k. The J- in Juan is also correctly pronounced like the German -ch-, maybe a teensy tad softer.

As the German "CH" has become a prominent side-topic of this thread, I'll threw in my . Here's an explantation I posted in a Rammstein Forum long ago:

The German "Ch" is basically a very aspirated "H", but it can be pronounced in two ways, which I will tell:
- the "hard Ch" (mostly transliterated as "Kh" in English), and
- the "soft Ch" (which sounds somewhat like English "Sh").

The "Ch" is pronounched the soft way after I and E, as in "ich" ("I"), "sich" ("oneself"), "Licht" ("light"), "fechten" ("to fence") or "Eisbrecher" ("Icebreaker").
It is also pronounced the soft way after Umlauts.

It is pronounced the hard way after A, O and U, as in "Rache" ("revenge"), "lachen ("to laugh"), hoch ("high"), noch ("still") or "buch" ("book").
OK, that's a lot of rules. Sounds difficult? Now, as languages go, they consist of rules, and German, while having a rather complicated grammer, has very few rules of pronouncation, compared to english or french. Every letter is pronounced the same way everytime, with very few exeptions - and this is one of these.

There are no original German words beginning with "Ch", but the German language uses several foreign words and names with initial "Ch". Those are pronounced as in their original languages, which most often means the "soft Ch", as in "Chemie", "Chanson", "China", "Chester", but someties also the "hard Ch", as in "Chaos" or "Christus". Most Germans find it hard to pronounce a hard Ch in the beginning, and pronounce it as an "K".

So how they are pronounced?
OK, lets start with the "soft Ch":
As said before, it sounds somwhat like English "Sh", but not quite exactly so. The real equivalent of English "Sh" would be German "Sch".
Try to speek a "Sh". Your lips will be rounded almost as when speaking an "O", and your tongue will be at your upper palate, pretty near to your upper teeth. Continue to pronounce that "Sh", but move the corners of your mouth apart, widen your mouth as much as possible. Move your tongue sllightly backwards, and try to move the point in your mouth where you can "feel" the sound back to your upper throat. Now you have it.
For examples, listen to Till when he sings "Ich" or "Du hast mich".

And now the "hard Ch":
You will probalbly know that soud when you ever have heard Arab or Hebrew, for it's very common in semitic languages. Remember the laughter of Ernie in Sesame street? That's exactly the "hard Ch". I've read that that the "Ch" in Scottish "loch" sounds like the German (hard) one. But as I never heard it spoken by a real Scott I didn't know if this is correct.
In English it most often tranliterated as "Kh", but English speakers tend to pronounce that as a "K", which is close but not really correct. See "Tutankhamen": Ancient Egyptian is a close relative of semitic and also has this sound which would be written as an (hard) "Ch" in German (in Egyptian it is a hieroglyph looking like a circle with horizontal lines in it). In German the King's Name is written "Tutanchamun" and pronounced with the "hard Ch", which ist true to the original Egyptian pronounciation.
How do you learn to speak it? I would advise you to begin with a "H", speak it really loud with much pressure of air, and try to pronounce it far back in your throat.

That's it
enjoy!

There is a meaning in every word which is also carried by pronunciation, not only by orthography, so when I borrow a word (especially a name - because of respect for the person) into my language I'll try to carry over the full meaning including pronunciation to the best of my knowledge and vocal organs.

I respectfully disagree. Many Europeans do this to some degree, but it is really an issue only in Germany. And even here it is a relatively recent phenomen. It was not before the invention of radio that most people (here and elsewhere) even had the opportunity to know the original pronounciation of foreign words first-hand. For millenia, it was normal to have mostly written records of foreigen words. This mainly applies to place and person names, as of course for most other "everyday" words, the native term was used. Therefore, there is a German name ("Rom") and an English one ("Rome") for the Italian city of "Roma". München is Munich and Köln is Cologne in English. And even you would not pronounce "Paris" with a silent S. This is no shift in meaning, it's a variation of pronounciation in the context of different languages. And it even adds something to the "meaning" of those places that they have names in more than one language. It makes for diversity, and diversity is what makes the world rich and interesting.

[knightkrawler]

German orthography is pretty straightforward, compared to English or French. But I would be interested how you pronounce my nick, please tell!

That's where I respectfully disagree. French and English, the two single most chaotic (in an orthographic sense) languages among European languages, shouldn't serve as comparisons. Czech or Italian, as you suggested, should. Those are straightforward.

Your own nickname is an example for how confusing German orthography is:
V1: Big Benne: open-mid, near-front, unrounded, short, as you suggest you want to be pronounced (as in Big Ben)
V2: Big Beene or Big Behne: close-mid, front/near-front, unrounded, long -e- as in dehnen
Vx: Big Bene: any pronunciation of the two. Intuitively and subconsciously I decided for V2. Why? It's more logical because for someone wanting to be pronouced V1 I would expect him to double the consonant as in (BeNjamin -> BeNNi/BeNNy. The -e- in Benjamin is already V1, so tell me about straightforward orthography). There you go.

I respectfully disagree. Many Europeans do this to some degree, but it is really an issue only in Germany. And even here it is a relatively recent phenomen. It was not before the invention of radio that most people (here and elsewhere) even had the opportunity to know the original pronounciation of foreign words first-hand. For millenia, it was normal to have mostly written records of foreigen words. This mainly applies to place and person names, as of course for most other "everyday" words, the native term was used. Therefore, there is a German name ("Rom") and an English one ("Rome") for the Italian city of "Roma". München is Munich and Köln is Cologne in English. And even you would not pronounce "Paris" with a silent S. This is no shift in meaning, it's a variation of pronounciation in the context of different languages. And it even adds something to the "meaning" of those places that they have names in more than one language. It makes for diversity, and diversity is what makes the world rich and interesting.

Don't you think the cities you quoted as examples are and always have been OLD, RENOWNED, and very much "in aller Munde", even abroad? Those proper names were used so often that comfort started to play a role in pronouncing them. Ask any Englishman why their French loanwords are now pronounced so English that they just sound wrong. Maitre d', which is, interestingly in itself a farce loanword. Also, words and proper names as your town name examples were borrowed BEFORE there was common orthography.
The valid exmples would be those that haven't even been borrowed. Maybe I expressed this wrong. I wasn't talking about loanwords specifically, at least not eh long established ones. I was talking about sporadically used words and especially names from foreign languages.
What about Avignon? Do you say /a'viknon/ after German orthography? I suppose not. Sevilla. /sev'ija/, right? Here's the comfort/renown/frequently used example underlining my thesis from Spanish: Mallorca. Most Germans now say /malorka/ which sounds as wrong as it is in my ears. But they just say it so often they made its pronunciation comfortable.

The more often a borrowed word is used, the more likely it is to be changed according to the borrowing language's orthography.

My point being: I call a Juan /chu'an/, if only because I can. I even try to pronounce Chinese names right if I've heard the correct version, but that might just be me. And maybe it's not respect, but something different. Effort. Or just trying to get it right.

[Patroclus]

I laugh a lot with tasoe’s last post, I didn’t know… lol, still laughing…

Mine was about 8-9 years ago when I, my brother and a friend discovered the lineage 2 mmo. We had a lot of free time to burn on that period, and we are trying to find a good clan name. So, we choose the “Myrmidons”, which was a group of warriors in ancient Greece, and we get names from the most known of those heroes. Patroclus, Diomedes, Ajax. At the first months we are exping together having a lot of hilarious moments which I still remember. After years of playing our clan gets bigger and bigger, we assigned in an ally of more than 100 people online everyday and Myrmidons write their own history. I was the first tank of the ally and the job of the first tank was to kill bosses. For those who don’t know lineage, every time you go for raiding bosses the main tank goes in a full party of healers, then he holds the boss alone taking tons of damage while the healers keep him alive, and after that 50-60 people are hitting the boss to take him down. It was very heroic to see your char hold those beasts and so many people thank you for having their drops. I still have somewhere a T-shirt that I’ve made from some screenshots. From that time Patroclus or Patro is my favorite option as a nickname.

[Daedalus]

Daedalus... I know there are two valid ways of saying the name. Daydalus and Deedalus. Do you prefer one of the two?

I've thought of it as Daydalus. To be honest, I've never been confident of pronouncing ae, so ay is my best interpretation.

As for meaning, I'm drawing from Greek myth, as well. I've always admired inventors and craftsmen, and so my handle is an effort to con fellow Quest creators that I wear that mantle.