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A silly question re: pronunciation


Emily Snow

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(This is my first post on the ASOIAF forum, so.... Hi! ^_^)

Is there some sort of official pronunciation guide somewhere for some of the more exotic names (i.e. Jalabhar Xho)? I tried searching both this forum and Google and had no luck.

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GRRM has said he doesn't really mind how you pronounce the names.

Having said that! http://www.makinggameofthrones.com/production-diary/2011/2/11/official-pronunciation-guide-for-game-of-thrones.html

The above is for the TV series, though. For some readers (myself included) pronunciations are going to differ. Personally it doesn't matter to me; I've stuck to pronouncing Jaime like the series does since hearing it so often, but other names are the same in my head but different in theshow.

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(This is my first post on the ASOIAF forum, so.... Hi! ^_^)

Is there some sort of official pronunciation guide somewhere for some of the more exotic names (i.e. Jalabhar Xho)? I tried searching both this forum and Google and had no luck.

Welcome, Emily!

I don't believe there is an official pronounciation guide, most probably because many of those names like Xho have never actually been spoken aloud by the person who made them up! Our beloved author, of course. I frequently see members in various threads asking one another how they pronounce this or that name, and there are always variations, everybody's got different ideas about how to pronounce the names. Guess we'll all have to wait til all these characters come to the HBO series to actually hear their names pronounced!

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Welcome, Emily!

Thanks! Good to be here!

GRRM has said he doesn't really mind how you pronounce the names.

I don't believe there is an official pronounciation guide, most probably because many of those names like Xho have never actually been spoken aloud by the person who made them up! Our beloved author, of course. I frequently see members in various threads asking one another how they pronounce this or that name, and there are always variations, everybody's got different ideas about how to pronounce the names. Guess we'll all have to wait til all these characters come to the HBO series to actually hear their names pronounced!

Thanks to you both. :) I suppose I'll just have to make it up as I go for now. Back to reading! *furiously turns pages, hoping to finish the rest of ASoS and AFfC in 12 days...*

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If you go with the most obvious pronunciation, you'll be close to what George reads in his own head. But as others have noted, GRRM has publicly said that he doesn't really care how people pronounce the names as long as it makes you happy. :)

Two notable weird ones (from the various readings I've been to over the years):

Petyr = Pee-ter (I always used the "short e" sound rather than "long e.")

Brienne = Bree-uh-nee (not kidding on that one. The said, I pronounce it Bree-EN because I'm stubborn. :lol:)

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Brienne = Bree-uh-nee (not kidding on that one. The said, I pronounce it Bree-EN because I'm stubborn. :lol:)

You're serious?? Bree-uh-nee? I've been Bree-EN-ing all these years! Of course, I also had Dany and Viserys wrong all these years, too. At least, assuming the HBO people have it right. I've always said (in my own head) DAN-erys and VIS-erys. And Varys, he's always been 'Varies' to me, but HBO has Ned Stark calling him 'Lord Varis.' Oh well. Different strokes, I guess...

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Petyr = Pee-ter (I always used the "short e" sound rather than "long e.")

Brienne = Bree-uh-nee (not kidding on that one. The said, I pronounce it Bree-EN

Thanks to Roy Dotrice I'm likely going to be pronouncing those Pe-TIRE and Bri-EEN in my head from now on.

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About Jalabhar Xho, my guess is that his name would sound like: Ya-LA-bar Zo ;)

My first guess was djah-lahb-har khoh (with an extra strong 'k' for the xh, if that makes any sense). *shrug*

Which would make Xaro Xhoan Daxos 'kah-roh khoh-ahn dah-kohs'... lol tacos. j/k! :P (Maybe from now on I'll just call him "Tacos" for short.)

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I think we have George outnumbered on the 'Bree-en' thing. He's just going to have to accept that he was wrong on that one. ;)

Totally. I swear my jaw dropped the first time I heard George read a Brienne chapter, think "who the fuck is he talking abou....oh holy shit, that's how he pronounces 'Brienne!'" :lol:

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I think we have George outnumbered on the 'Bree-en' thing. He's just going to have to accept that he was wrong on that one. ;)

To be fair, he did say that we could pronounce it however we like, so long as it makes us happy, right?

But in doing a bit of research, I've found that it's a Celtic name. Being completely ignorant of the Celtic language, I can't say for sure whether or not that's how they'd pronounce it, but I suspect that's where the other pronunciation comes from.

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hey, looks like how I first pronounced Brienne was right. I did later start calling her 'Bree-en'.

I never worry too much about getting the names right, but that can sometimes mean I make a fool of myself when talking about books.

As for Jalabhar Xho I just say "Jab-ar Zo". It was worse when I used to read Harry Potter to my little sister. Those spells where a bitch.

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My first guess was djah-lahb-har khoh (with an extra strong 'k' for the xh, if that makes any sense). *shrug*

Which would make Xaro Xhoan Daxos 'kah-roh khoh-ahn dah-kohs'... lol tacos. j/k! :P (Maybe from now on I'll just call him "Tacos" for short.)

Yeah, call him Tacos, sounds just fine and tasty! :P

My opinion is that all those "Xh"s could be pronounced as "Z"s. Like this stupid "warrior princess" Xena (Zee-na) or the company Xerox (Zee-rox). I have also been used to that, because I read "A game of thrones" and "A clash of kings" from the greek translations (then I continued with the english books) and the greek translator used "Z" both for Jalabhar Xho and for Xaro Xhoan Daxos (Zah-roh Zoh-ahn Dak-sos). Of course the translator can sometimes be wrong...

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Since we are not talking about "conventional" names a lot depends on your native language. German speakers might pronounce it one way, English speakers another, Spanish different way altogether etc.

I guess only real way to know would be to hear GRRM say them. :P

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My opinion is that all those "Xh"s could be pronounced as "Z"s. Like this stupid "warrior princess" Xena (Zee-na) or the company Xerox (Zee-rox). I have also been used to that, because I read "A game of thrones" and "A clash of kings" from the greek translations (then I continued with the english books) and the greek translator used "Z" both for Jalabhar Xho and for Xaro Xhoan Daxos (Zah-roh Zoh-ahn Dak-sos). Of course the translator can sometimes be wrong...

I rather like that pronunciation, I think, now that I hear it. You've convinced me. I'm still not sure about Jalabar 'Zoh', but it's growing on me.

I guess only real way to know would be to hear GRRM say them. :P

Or wait until HBO gets around to it.... *sadface*

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  • 1 month later...

Bump!

When I started reading the first book I was confounded by so many names with a Y in them. I knew how they were pronounced in the HBO episodes, but there wasn't a consistency. Why is Tyrion "TEER-ee-on" but Tywin is "TIE-win"?

I mostly thought that the Y served as an other-worldy twist on some fairly regular names -- Petyr is just a "Peter", Jeyne is just a "Jane", Pyp is just a "Pip", and so on. But then the HBO show pronounced Lysa Arryn as "LIE-sa", when I was sure she was a regular Lisa! After all, Lys is pronounced "LEESE", so why is Lysa pronounced "LIE-sa?" :dunno:

Once I started book 2 I was left to my own devices to pronounce the new names!

Pronouncing Brienne as anything other than Bree-EN is ridiculous.

GRRM can go to hell with his Q's as well. Qarth... I couldn't decide on Quarth or Karth. It was interchangeable. Qohor... um... Quo-hor or Kohor? I don't know. Qhorin Halfhand... I have a headache.

And what about R'hllor? We finally get some help with this one half way through ASoS when Arya asks, "Who's Rulore?" That's an author's trick to communicate pronunciations to the reader. It gets cheesy when you notice it, but I wish there had been a bit more of that.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Bump!

When I started reading the first book I was confounded by so many names with a Y in them. I knew how they were pronounced in the HBO episodes, but there wasn't a consistency. Why is Tyrion "TEER-ee-on" but Tywin is "TIE-win"?

I mostly thought that the Y served as an other-worldy twist on some fairly regular names -- Petyr is just a "Peter", Jeyne is just a "Jane", Pyp is just a "Pip", and so on. But then the HBO show pronounced Lysa Arryn as "LIE-sa", when I was sure she was a regular Lisa! After all, Lys is pronounced "LEESE", so why is Lysa pronounced "LIE-sa?" :dunno:

Once I started book 2 I was left to my own devices to pronounce the new names!

Pronouncing Brienne as anything other than Bree-EN is ridiculous.

GRRM can go to hell with his Q's as well. Qarth... I couldn't decide on Quarth or Karth. It was interchangeable. Qohor... um... Quo-hor or Kohor? I don't know. Qhorin Halfhand... I have a headache.

And what about R'hllor? We finally get some help with this one half way through ASoS when Arya asks, "Who's Rulore?" That's an author's trick to communicate pronunciations to the reader. It gets cheesy when you notice it, but I wish there had been a bit more of that.

Part of this is just the cheesy replacement of regular spellings. Like you, I’ve always had Tywin as IPA [ˈtʰaɪwɨn] but Tyrion as [ˈtʰiːɹiən]. I think that’s because that follows how we already pronounce those in existing English words, respectively like Tyler and tyrian purple, or like tyrant versus tyrannous: where the first one in each case has the [aɪ] diphthong in its stressed syllable but the second of the pair always has [iː].

I agree that the q’s without u’s following them is pretty tough, since we just don’t do that in English. I would not substitute in a u after it, but just treat it as though it were a k. I can’t see anybody in Westeros doing anything fancier than that. So Qarth is just [ˈkʰɑɹθ] and Qhorin is just [ˈkʰoɹɨn].

Now, if they were Essos names, which are supposed to sound bizarre and foreign, then I could possibly see something like [ˈxɑɹθ] and even [ˈχʰoɹɨn], but those just don’t come out of your mouth without a lot of throat clearing, so I take them as assimilated to our normal phonetic forms with simple k’s.

In this posting I have more phonetic spellings of ASOIAF words in standard IPA notation. I’m about halfway done.

PS: No, you don’t want to know what I had to do to enter those. ;-{ It is just too awful to contemplate doing without computer assistance. You have to enter them as their numeric HTML entities. I just use cut and paste with my mouse from the Wikipedia IPA page into a UTF-8 text buffer and then run it through a program that converts non-ASCII into numeric HTML entities. Simply horrible! It’s because these boards default to ISO-8850-1 instead of UTF-8 like most others do. Ug!!

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