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Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Oct 10, 2018 0:46:24 GMT
When reading and writing fantasy and sci-fi names how important is it to you to be able to pronounce it? Do you tend to choose simple names that would be easy for readers to recognize, even if spelled a bit differently? Or do you like to go out and create really weird names with awkward spellings and no vowels? I suppose the biggest concern when naming characters is whether you care if readers say them right or not. If peeps mispronouncing and butchering your character's names is less of a concern than characters having cool names that you like, then go crazy. But if you really want readers and the actors who eventually portray them on TV to say them correctly then you will probably want to make them as simple as possible. Readers will definitely mispronounce some of my character's names because I enjoy different spelling and intonations. But some will be quite simple and familiar. As a reader, I usually choose a sound I like the best and use that in my head until I see the TV show, and go, "ohhh, that's how you say that?" And then I'll either switch over or I won't depending on which sound I like best.  |
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Post by corabuhlert on Oct 10, 2018 3:00:14 GMT
The characters in my space opera series are descended from colonists who left Earth centuries to millennia ago, therefore I use names from the respective cultural and ethnic backgrounds for both people and places like planets, cities, etc... Some of them may be difficult to pronounce. For example, I bet most readers would mispronounce the name of Ensign Willem Hoogeveen, a supporting character in a recent novella, unless they happen to speak Dutch. But I want to present a diverse universe and not one comprised solely of white people named Smith and Jones.
But then many names are difficult to pronounce for someone from another culture. I just recently learned from a Chinese colleague that I have been mispronouncing the name of SF author Liu Cixin for several years now.
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Post by Jeff Tanyard on Oct 10, 2018 7:44:07 GMT
When reading and writing fantasy and sci-fi names how important is it to you to be able to pronounce it? Do you tend to choose simple names that would be easy for readers to recognize, even if spelled a bit differently? Or do you like to go out and create really weird names with awkward spellings and no vowels? I suppose the biggest concern when naming characters is whether you care if readers say them right or not. If peeps mispronouncing and butchering your character's names is less of a concern than characters having cool names that you like, then go crazy. But if you really want readers and the actors who eventually portray them on TV to say them correctly then you will probably want to make them as simple as possible. Readers will definitely mispronounce some of my character's names because I enjoy different spelling and intonations. But some will be quite simple and familiar. As a reader, I usually choose a sound I like the best and use that in my head until I see the TV show, and go, "ohhh, that's how you say that?" And then I'll either switch over or I won't depending on which sound I like best.
For me as a reader, it's very important. I don't want a name to be a stumbling block that jars me out of a story. I also don't like it when authors tell me that a name is pronounced in a different way from how I've been saying it in my head. I'm thinking of Robert Jordan here. I still pronounce Aiel as "Ale" in my head, not the two-syllable "eye-eel" that Jordan wanted us to use.
As an author, I try to use names whose pronunciation is obvious at a glance. And I'm not going to tell anyone how to pronounce any of those names, because I don't want readers getting frustrated about "doing it wrong" the same way I was with Jordan. Once I hit publish, that book is released into the wild, and it's the readers' prerogative to interpret the words in whatever way they see fit.
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Post by kateelizabeth on Oct 10, 2018 16:26:56 GMT
That's a good question. As a writer, overall I go for easy-to-pronounce names. My real first name and maiden name are both easy to misspell and mispronounce, so dealing with that, I've carried that into my work. As a reader, I'm sure that I get name pronunciations wrong all the time, so I'm never really surprised when I hear the correct pronunciation in a movie or TV show.
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Post by corabuhlert on Oct 11, 2018 3:42:09 GMT
To emphasise my point that every name is difficult to pronounce to someone somewhere, I'd like to post this classic German comedy skit of a German TV announcer attempting to sum up the plot of a British drama series and having serious problems pronouncing the very English names of places and characters:
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