Pronunciation Guide?

[Atilium she/her]

So I was wondering, what to you think of pronunciation guides for fantasy books? Annoying? Helpful? Personally it depends on the book... like for Wheel of Time the guide is very helpful, but in Eragon I just found the guide annoying, as I pronounced everything differently from the author. Thoughts? 

[Erai Sedai he/him]

Man there are so many different ways to pronounce names that sometimes it's disheartening to hear them. When you've called a character a certain name for so long and then an audio book comes out and says it differently and all of a sudden you don't know which one to use, i hate it!

I think you should just go with what pronunciation you like best and stick with. It's kind of like how certain surnames can be pronounced differently depending on the country you're in.

[Argent he/him]

The thing is, even what we consider canonical pronunciation is usually not the most correct version. The most correct version would be the in-world one, and in most cases we don't know what that is. Kaladin? Pretty straightforward. Kelsier? Even Brandon doesn't say his name like it's supposed to sound. And that's okay - this is one of those things that make up Brandon's "25% of writing left to the readers." In other words, Brandon's books are 75% his, and 25% yours, and those 25% are what make the book an experience personal to you - how certain names sound, how certain characters look, what the vaguer parts of the world look like, and so on.

 

Back the audio books, though. In some cases the narrators have some kind of a pronunciation guide from the author, but not in all of them. Plus, even when they do use a pronunciation guide, it doesn't have all the names. So yeah, it's a little weird to hear familiar names pronounced differently (I've been listening the The Black Prism on Graphic Audio, and the voice actors decided, for some reason, that Garadul should be pronounced Haradul...), but there isn't much you can do about it. 

[Shardlet he/him]

Sometimes a pronunciation guide is nice.  It does get sometimes confusing (tedious) for conversation when my wife and I pronounce names differently.  For the most part, it obviously doesn't matter how you pronounce names.  The only time it may be desirable to pronounce them correctly is in conversation with others (including the author).  On nice thing about Brandon, as Argent pointed out, is that he doesn't mind alternative pronunciation of character names.  So, no embarrassment when talking to him about a character.  

 

However, for a while there, it seemed that authors felt that their character names needed to be absolutely unique.  What we ended up with were a lot of names that readers either stumbled over though half the book while they settled on a pronunciation or they simply glossed over the name or replaced it with some kind of truncation or nickname.  In those cases a pronunciation guide is a good thing (although more reasonably or decipherable names might be a better solution).  In other cases, you may get more stylistic names that the author uses to establish an identifiable nationality or racial identity for the characters (Tolkien did this in Middle Earth).  In such a case, somewhat wonky names and a pronunciation guide do not go amiss (In my opinion).

[Khyrindor he/him]

I pronounced almost all the names in the Cosmere wrong, but the real pronunciations are much cooler.

 

Elend (being German), is AY-lind, which also means Elendel is AY-lind-el. (The problem with this is that his nickname, El, would sound like "Ale".)

Jasnah is YASS-nah.

Kelsier is probably pronounced the French way, Kell-syay. (I refuse.)

[Argent he/him]

Kelsier is probably pronounced the French way...

 

Indeed.

[FeatherWriter she/her]

I tend to like pronunciation guides, but that's just because I'm both a linguist who likes knowing how to day things, and someone who often reads books aloud. I know I found out that I said most of the Stormlight names incorrectly and I made an effort to change them (as you can hear me struggling with all the way through Splintercast.) I've mostly gotten them correct now, but I swear listening to me swap between AY-doh-lin and AH-doh-lin, or REN-a-rin and ren-AHR-in for the entire book is probably annoying.

 

I like saying things correctly, and I think guides help with that. The way I see it, if you don't care about them, you can ignore them, but for those of us who like canon pronunciations, they're really helpful.

[shortycake she/her]

I would really like a pronunciation guide, because I have this weird anxiety regarding talking about a series and pronouncing a character's name horribly, horribly wrong. 

 

As it stands, I'll never get used to Brandon's pronunciation of Shallan's name. 

 

At this point I pretty much just go with whatever I want. I know I'm butchering half their names, but such is the life of a reader. 

[Atilium she/her]

I would really like a pronunciation guide, because I have this weird anxiety regarding talking about a series and pronouncing a character's name horribly, horribly wrong. 

 

As it stands, I'll never get used to Brandon's pronunciation of Shallan's name. 

 

At this point I pretty much just go with whatever I want. I know I'm butchering half their names, but such is the life of a reader. 

 

Personally I tenhd to find another name or word i know to base the pronuncian off of. Like a series I recently read, the main charahcter was named Pazel, so pronounced it like "Hazel" except with a P. My mother however was saying something that sounded like "Gazelle." which really messed with my head, and the author was saying something more along the lines of "Parcel."

 

I agree with the anxiety thing! My friends and I are always having arguments over whether its Seth, Zeth, or Szteh...

 

Like Argent said, though, I love it that Brandon leaves it up to us.

 

How does Bandon Sanderson pronounce Shallan?

[Delightful]

How does Bandon Sanderson pronounce Shallan?

Something like Shu-lawn. 

 

Pronunciation guides do have that advantage of giving an official way of saying unusual names, which definitely helps talking to someone who doesn't know what character you're talking about. Also, I much prefer Ay-do-lin and Ren-AHR-rin to how I was pronouncing them before.

 

On the other hand, I remember getting annoyed at the Eragon pronunciation guide because it was all written for an American accent (I say something that sounds more like Error-Gone than Er-a-gahn.....although maybe transcribed that all sounds the same anyway?), and the hardest word to pronounce, Silthrim, didn't even help because 'the sound of the [unusual i] is hard to transcribe.' 

 

Overall, I guess they can be useful, but as long as you can legitimately ignore them and pronounce how you like, that's best I think. Because it's way awkward to find out you've been pronouncing something wrong for years..

[Argent he/him]

Something like Shu-lawn. 

 

sha-LAN sounds, in my head, closer to what he says.

 

He could probably have a fan-maintained pronunciation guide based on how Brandon says things - I figure that's as close to official as we are going to get. 

[Delightful]

sha-LAN sounds, in my head, closer to what he says.

 

He could probably have a fan-maintained pronunciation guide based on how Brandon says things - I figure that's as close to official as we are going to get. 

To me it definitely sounds like 'lawn'