forum Does anyone do fantasy characters with unpronounceable names?

Started July 19, 2018 by @yeetus

tune

At the moment all of my characters have character names that are pretty much unpronounceable. Is this normal?

It's quite common in fantasy and science fiction, especially alien races, for characters to have names unfamiliar to human ears. Some authors like to stick together strange combinations of letters just to look foreign, which I wouldn‘t recommend.

Remember though that you want your readers to connect with your characters, which can be harder if their names look like a cat ran over the keyboard. Can you pronounce their names?

Yes
But then I'm into some series with the most unpronounceable names ever

It's up to you, really. :) Some of the names I have for my characters are a bit strange, so I try to write them in the most intuitive way possible for an English-speaking audience, and some of my characters with longer names get referred to mostly by their nicknames (e.g. Bennadan gets called Ben, Ghilandar gets called Ghil).

I think the two you listed are really not that unpronounceable. My MC is called Kiliandrè (Andrè or Andros for short). But I'm going to include a very detailed pronunciation at the back of the book because I used non-English sounds for some letter combination (e.g. the Welsh "dd" pronounced as "th")

They were an example of longer names. :) For unpronounceable I've got Solflirath, Dharchèn and my username, which is thankfully not in-story. :P I think Kiliandrè looks not too hard. Pronunciation guides are very helpful though.

What does your è represent, and is its use based off an existing language?

Most of my e's at the end of words are ë's, that's a special case, aesthetics mostly, because I though Kiliandreë would look a little weird. I am a huge Tolkien nerd so I used his languages as a guide sort of for sounds and the like. I think my language right now (for names and other stuff) resemble the Celtic languages and probably sounds a bit like German, but then I don't either of these. I'm going to roll all the r's though

I think people often find diacritics confusing, especially as they often have different meanings in different languages. For example, the double dot is an Umlaut in German (it changes the sound of the vowel) but the double dot is called a tréma in French, and indicates that vowels need to be pronounced separately (like in reënter and coöperate). I use it in the second way (heavily influenced by Tolkien).

What vowel sound is on the end of Kiliandrè? My guess was something between an [eh] and an [ay], but for Kiliandreë I would guess it to be two sounds, pronounced Kih-lee-an-dreh-ey.

[ay], but the other ë's are [eh] (also heavily influenced by Tolkien in everything)
Do you use these things in your names?
Off topic, but, have you read The Silmarillion and HoME?

After much trial and error and reworking of phonetics, I've settled on using only two diacritics in the transliteration of my major fantasy language - the grave accent (è and à) to mark a shorter, more central vowel; and the diaeresis (ë) when vowels need to be pronounced separately. For example, can is [kahn] and càn is [kan] (like tin can]. Veän is [veh-ahn], not veen or vane. And I put ë on the end of words because the tendency of English readers is to assume that final [e]s are silent, and my letters are never silent.

I've read the Silmarillion, but I don’t have a copy of HoME or Children of Húrin. Tolkien's work is amazing. While C. S. Lewis sparked my love of fantasy, it was Tolkien who cemented it and began my love of linguistics and conlanging. I think my main language is more germanic than his elvish tongues though.

What's your language like?

I really don't know.
It has rolled r's, the hard and soft h hard spelled as "ch", hard and soft [th] hard spelled as "th" and soft spelled as "dd".
I use diaereses at the ends of words for the same reason, also to separate sounds.
C is always the [k] (Tolkien influence) unless the next letter is marked (e.g. cé, cí)

Amen to the c is always [k]! I think our languages would probably look a little similar since we're both heavily inspired by the same writer. :) What do you mean when you say the 'hard' h? Is it like the German ch as in Bach?

I use the voiced th as well, except I spell it dh (to match th, I'm a sucker for patterns). There are a few things I know I'm going to need to overlook when it comes to others reading/pronouncing my made up words. One is word stress - no matter how many times I remind the reader, 'the last syllable is stressed', I know people will mostly stress on the first syllable to match English. And I think I'll be okay with my a and à being mixed up, but I really hope they don't do silent es.

Do you use the grave accent to lengthen vowels? (i.e., ee becomes è)

Yes it's the German ch.
I'm not doing the grave accent one. The one thing that will completely piss me off is if they did all the "ea" as [ee] because I'm not doing any accents but they are all going to be pronounced as two syllables [ee-ah]
I think it's highly unlikely they'll do the silent e's at the end unless they completely overlooked the pronunciation guide. For my pronunciation guide I am going to write out every single word, because the pronunciation guide at the back of The Silmarillion is a pain in the neck. Like, I read that book like five times and I still can't say some names.

This reminds me of Xenoblade Chronicles 2, where one of the characters is named Zeke, but it comes around that he's the prince of an isolationist nation and he needs to be a neutral third-party in peace talks, yadda yadda, but we find out that his full name is Ozychlyrus Brounev Tantal, which I never would have been able to pronounce had the cutscene not been voice-acted. I feel that a good rule of thumb is to have something like a nickname or shortened form or SOMETHING so that the reader can get through the name without giving up, which could also lead to some fun exchanges like the MC trying to wrap their head around the pronunciation, or the character with the long name being indignant to the fact that they have been given something like a pet name.

Wow.
I think none of my names are that bad yet, just a little confusing but I think should be manageable if they read the pronunciation guide.
What are your names like?