I've recently started listening to some of the audiobooks I bought way back when and haven't heard for years, things like the X-wing series, Thrawn trilogy etc The way the narrator pronounced certain names then started a small debate in our house over how to say names like Ysanne Isard, Ysalamiri or Celchu and eventually we got round to my forum name here Qel, partly taken from Qel-Droma. I've always said it as Kel or Khell, others say Quel or Qwell what do you think? I realise this is slightly odd as a thread but talking about it just made me think about all the strange and wonderful names for characters, species and places the authors have come up with over the years and more disturbingly that I've probably been mispronouncing them all this time. Anyone had a similar thing or a name you've read and just thought 'what?!' and that maybe they'd gone too far in the quest for alien sounding names?
However you want to, just listen to Ep 3 when the Jedi talk about the Wookiee home world, it is positively hilarious
Or you can just say what Mira does in KOTOR 2: "It has a lot of K's and Y's and it sounds like you're gargling ronto spit when you say it."
Odd as this is going to sound, I actually am sometimes a bit disappointed at the consistency in a lot of pronunciations, as in a galaxy so vast and diverse, you'd expect a lot of different accents, etc. I mean, sure, you get actors with accents, and their existing real life accent will put a certain emphasis on certain real words, but when it then comes to made up Star Wars stuff, they usually show more consistency than not, presumably because they've all read the scrip and gone "How do you pronounce that?" to the rest of the cast, and they tell each other "Oh, it's like..." I imagine that's why it's the real words like Tyranus that have more variation than the made up fictional names... and that's a shame, really, as I'd love to hear different speakers say names like Anakin or Obi-Wan differently, but you never hear anybody, say, give Obi-Wan a slightly Germanic spin and make it sound more like Obi-Van, and I'd actually enjoy little quirks like that now and again. Or, say, have someone pronounce the "J" in Jabba more like a "Y", as in quite a lot of European languages they do that, and it'd make sense for some of the different characters in Jabba's Palace to come from different backgrounds, and one say his name more like Yabba as I feel things like that would help add to the exotic setting, but all we usually get are either the "correct" pronunciations, or if they want to be "exotic", they just have them talk in Huttese or whatever and talk total gibberish. It's why I enjoy the odd versions of Coruscant, as it helps make it more obvious that these people aren't locals.
Well it starts with a tongue to the top front teeth forming a "th" sound then simply pronouce "cat" without the 'c' and there you go.
I prefer to take the lead from the actors. They are from all over the globe and I love accents. I don't really think there is a 'correct' way to say something as dialects and languages are so varied. The guide I usually strive to go by is 1. If someone I respect says it X way I often adopt it. 2. If I haven't heard it said at all or for a long time I say it the way it reads to me personally. 3. If I read it for years before hearing it said and I prefer my head way, I tend to keep it.
Zorrixor that's an interesting perspective. I guess in order to keep things accessible it isn't something story planners would really consider as it just adds a level of depth that might be seen as a barrier rather than a benefit. At the same time it makes me wonder what it would actually be like given by the movie period we've had thousands of years of humans spreading out from the core and a Republic centred on the core dominating much of the galaxy politically. Would technology such as hyperdrives and the holonet have broken the distances between solar systems down to such an extent that the culture of say Coruscant could have the same degree of cultural and linguistic influence as say America and American English has on Earth in the 20th/21st centuries? Cushing's Admirer well at this point my own reading of things is too engrained to be dislodged anyway, although if I use the name Qel when playing a game online and someone pronounces it as Quel/Qwell it is a little jarring and makes me wonder who is 'right' but isn't really a huge issue.
I think it's really up to the individual. You wait long enough someone will say you're wrong but if one is happy themselves that is what counts.
Qel The homogenisation of Galactic Basic over such a long period of time might certainly be a factor, yeah, though at the same time, I then think about how often we see places like Tatooine treated as backwater communities, or how often we get a story of Anakin and Obi-Wan (or 3PO and R2 ) visiting some previously undiscovered tribe on some world in TCW and stuff, who would all bring their own linguistic inflections. Even from a real life perspective, my attitude towards how.. consistent any particular dialect is ever going to become has actually weakened in the last few years. When I was younger, I used to buy into the Star Trek-type future of one language becoming universal, but... as I've got older and met more people, I've increasingly come to realise the reality that even in small communities you still get far, far more variety in language than one usually realises. I mean, why do the English, Welsh and Scots have so much variety when we all live on the same island? Or even if you take out the national rivalries in the UK and just look at different regions of England, or even just London itself, you get different speech patterns, different uses of words, etc, etc. A German friend of mind actually showed me something just last week about how the word "quite" apparently is used differently in America to England... which I never previously realised. According to that article, apparently when you guys across the Pond say something like, say, something is "quite good" you usually mean it in a lot more positive way than we usually would in England, where "quite" for us often is a lot more lukewarm, and it turned out that for years I've been saying stuff was "quite good" and that my German friend was getting entirely the wrong idea, which I had never even realised Bringing that back to the GFFA... Since there are still different languages used by different species, and it's not become completely absorbed into Galactic Basic, I imagine there'd still be a lot more variety in language than my twenty-year-old self probably would have expected ten years ago, but these days... I'm more skeptical about whether things would homogenise quite so much, especially when the GFFA is rife with nationalist identity and sectarianism -- hence there always being so many wars!
You've certainly put a lot of thought into this and yes I can relate to your examples being from London, always found it amusing how if you look on TV Britain apparently only has RP English or Cockney, but just within one city the differences can be quite large. Would be nice if they worked on this a little in GFFA so its a little less 'everyone speaks basic or huttese' but without it turning into '3PO what did 'it' say?' all the time.
Even the movies aren't consistent though. Han Solo is "Han" (rhymes with "pan") half the time and "Hahn" (rhymes with "on") half the time. Leia is sometimes "Lay-uh" and sometimes "Lee-uh."
I noticed another in-universe inconsistency in Rebels lately -- the pronunciation of "Sienar." Sometimes it's "See-nahr", other times "Sigh-nahr" (and IRC Hondo pronounced it more as "See-en-ahr" in TCW). As others have mentioned, it's fairly realistic. I have a sibling whose name everyone (even in our immediate family) pronounces differently. Plus as Zorrixor points out, different dialects, even in the same country, pronounce common words and place names differently.
I think I remember hearing Mike Stackpole pronounce Tycho Celchu as "Tie-Koe Sell-Koo." He helps us out with Ysanne Isard in the books with the way the protagonist characters nickname her Insane and Iceheart. I've heard so many variations of how to say C'Boath, and pretty much all of them were better than my own guess.
Iron_lord and Revanfan1: I think at various points, I thought those were the way to pronounce that name as well. I like the idea that it's open to individual interpretation, so we don't need to worry too much about getting it wrong.
Maybe the people who pronounce things - do so consistently though. With Luke and Han always pronouncing it "Lay-uh" and some others always pronouncing it "Lee-uh". That said, some people don't appear often enough to pronounce a particular word more than once.
Glad to see this provoked some interesting discussion. With the Celchu example mine is similar/the same as Iron lord but the audio book used the Sell-Koo pronunciation.
For Tycho Celchu, I always pronounce it as 'Tie-Koe Sell-Shoe', although I think that 'Sell-Chew' also has a nice ring. And for me, C'Boath = 'See-Bow-Ath' When it comes to names of movie characters, I tend to pronounce them like the characters pronounce it themselves. For example, Han Solo introduces himself in Mos Eisley as 'Han' (rhyming with 'Pan'). On Cloud City, Princess Leia calls herself 'Lay-uh'. AT-AT is also a name that causes a lot of confusion. Do you say 'Eth-Eth', or do you just spell the letters ('A-T-A-T')? Unfortunately, in the movies they are only called 'Imperial Walkers'. Personally, I like spell the letters.
