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A silly question re: pronunciation


Emily Snow

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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.

Some of these, I don't even consciously try to figure out how they're pronounced, then at some point I think about it and laugh at how I've been pronouncing them in my head. R'hllor ended up being rrrr-holler for some reason. And if not for watching the HBO series before I started reading, Catelyn would have had a long-a in my head. But, that said, Lysa is still "Lisa" when I read. I have no explanation for my reasoning, at all. Oh, and Bree-uh-nee?? wha?? Count me in the Bree-EN camp as well. When the second season starts on HBO, I can already picture myself fuming on the couch, hubby next to me rolling his eyes...... :D

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Thanks! Good to be here!

Thanks to you both. smile.gif 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...*

And how did you make out with finishing both in 12 days? I am finding that there is so much back-history in the first few chapters of AFfC it requires more focus than ripping through ASoS as I did (and who didn't?)

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

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.

XH is normally, in linguistics, pronounced as a glutteral x kind of sound (hard to describe). Otherwise, I'd say the name is basically "JAL-a-bar ZhOH".

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