Pronouncing historical names

Antiochus: Ant - Ee - Ok - Us which is basically the same as you say it Kryten :) I used to say it as Ant - Ee - Och - Us until I heard someone else actually say it.
 
Herodotus: He- Ro- Doh- Tus
 
Originally posted by Kryten
* However, I do have trouble with Boii (a Gallic tribe in North Italy).
Is it pronounced: Bo-ee-eye?
Or should it be: Bo-eye-ee?
Likewise with the Etruscan city of Veii (captured by the early Romans in 396BC).
Is it: Ve-ee-eye?
Or: Ve-eye-ee?
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After my three years of Latin I'm pretty sure I can handle this one.

The genitive of Latin words whose roots end in -i, such as imperium, -i are formed by adding an -i onto the root. So imperium would be imperii. This word is pronounced "im-per-ee-ee" with a short pause after the first "ee." Since Veii is from the Latin and Boii appears to be a term created by the Romans for that tribe, like Gallia for the Celts, I would assume that Veii is "vay-ee" and Boii is "boy-ee," the first two vowels being clusters and the ending i's being pronounced separately.
 
Originally posted by Sodfather

Since Veii is from the Latin and Boii appears to be a term created by the Romans for that tribe, like Gallia for the Celts, I would assume that Veii is "vay-ee"
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That depends on whether you're using a pure Latin pronunciation or an anglicized pronunciation. The Latin letter V, when used as a consonant, actually made a sound that we represent with W. So a Roman in classical times referring to Veii would have said something more like 'way-ee'. For myself, I can't be bothered with intruding a pure Latin word into an otherwise English sentence, so I simply pronounce it 'vay' and have done with it.
 
Originally posted by Chieftess


You missed Ehecatl Atzin when he was in the Civ3 demogame. :p Don't know if he's still around though.

I do know that the 'hau' is pronounced 'wa' (as in Chihuahua) and "tl" is like "tle" (as in cattle).

Pronounciation of Nahautl (Aztec language) names:

http://mrburnett.mine.nu/GCII/U1/outside/aztec/a-res22.html
http://www.quetzalcoatl.org/terminology.html
http://www.sil.org/mexico/nahuatl/24i-OrthographyNah.htm
http://www.zihua-ixtapa.com/~anotherday/2002_2003/dec/nahuatl2.html <-- Notice that we are all pronouncing Mexico wrong. :)

Pronounciation of Mayan (only because they're going to be in Civ3 Conquests):
http://www.mythome.org/mayanames.html

(Couldn't find much on Incan pronouciation).
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Way to go Chieftess! And yes, I do remember EA.
 
I think as far as foreign names go, you should do your best to approximate the native language's pronunciation if you have a chance to hear it, but otherwise just do your best. The world is filled with languages, many with unique phonetic sounds or morphemic combinations so we're never going to get them all right. In those cases where the name is of a larger historical context - i.e., London, Warsaw, etc. - your own language will probably have its own name, and that's fine. Why should for example a Greek person, whose language does not have the "sh" sound, suffer trying to pronounce "Warszawa"? It gets nastier with vowels. For instance, "Phoenix" (written "Fönix" in Polish); the "e" after the "o" means there is an umlauted ("ö") vowel and the resulting vowel is difficult for English-speakers to pronounce. (Umlauts are hard for Poles too but you don't spend centuries surrounded by Germans and not learn anything...) I'm sure XIII would gag if he ever heard my attempts to pronounce Chinese historical names - anyone for Qinshihuangdi? - but all I can do is take my best stab and hope someday a native speaker will help me get it right.
 
Darius is pronounced in Persian more like "D'ry-us". I'll look it up though, just to be sure.

As MCdread said, the problem is indeed with the English vowels. In Holland we'd say D'reios or D'raios...same for most countries here.
 
I say that knowing the full and correct pronunciation of a foreign name or word in its original language is only of real value if you speak or are learning to speak that language. Otherwise, using whatever form your language has adopted is better, even if only for the sake of clarity. For example, I've studied enough Dutch to know how the name Van Gogh is pronounced in that language. It's not even close to 'van go', like we say in America, or to 'van goff', like they say in Britain. But knowing it won't be of any value to me until the day when I can speak the language on a conversational level and actually travel to the Netherlands. Then, if he comes up, it'll be important to know the true pronunciation. To pronounce it 'van go' in the midst of an otherwise Dutch sentence would be asinine, even if speaking to a Netherlander who knew enough English to understand whom that noise refers to. But to give the name its full Dutch value in an otherwise English sentence would be met only with incomprehension. It involves a gutteral consonant sound we don't even have in English--twice!--and would most likely result in the person you're talking to making some stupid joke about phlegm. So even if you know how to make the sound, when speaking in English it's better to say 'van goff' in Britain or 'van go' in America for the sake of clarity; otherwise no one would know what you were talking about.

(And no offense meant to the Netherlanders here. I wasn't comparing the sound to phlegm, I was merely saying a lot of English-speakers would. But then, what would you expect from a people that are required to put eggs in our mouths before we can say anything? ;) )

That said, though, I still want to ask a question about Polish. As with all languages, I give Polish names their English equivalents if I know what they are, such as saying 'Warsaw' instead of 'Warszawa'. But I often see--in otherwise English writings, mind you--Polish words that are written with a letter that is unknown to me. It's a bit of a stumbling block, because I can't even guess at a pronunciation to use if there are letters present I don't even know. If there's an ascii code to reproduce the letter here, I don't know it, but it looks like an L with a short line through the middle. What sound does it make? I've just been pronouncing it like an L, like the city 'Wroclaw' (that L is supposed to be the letter in question, but like I said, I don't know how to write it here), I've been pronouncing something like 'Vrock-lahv'. Is that even remotely correct? (The Ws I'm basing on the fact that I've been told 'Warszawa' is pronounced 'Varshava', which leads me to the conclusion that the Polish W has the same sound as the German W.)
 
That said, though, I still want to ask a question about Polish. As with all languages, I give Polish names their English equivalents if I know what they are, such as saying 'Warsaw' instead of 'Warszawa'. But I often see--in otherwise English writings, mind you--Polish words that are written with a letter that is unknown to me. It's a bit of a stumbling block, because I can't even guess at a pronunciation to use if there are letters present I don't even know. If there's an ascii code to reproduce the letter here, I don't know it, but it looks like an L with a short line through the middle. What sound does it make? I've just been pronouncing it like an L, like the city 'Wroclaw' (that L is supposed to be the letter in question, but like I said, I don't know how to write it here), I've been pronouncing something like 'Vrock-lahv'. Is that even remotely correct? (The Ws I'm basing on the fact that I've been told 'Warszawa' is pronounced 'Varshava', which leads me to the conclusion that the Polish W has the same sound as the German W.)

I think this is the 2nd time in my life someone has asked me about Polish pronunciation... :love:

It's a bit of a story but essentially the Slavic languages, as they broke into the three distinct groupings we have today (Eastern, Western and Southern) all developed similar characteristics within these groups. In the Western Slavic languages (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Wend/Sorb) a palatalization process took place for the r's and l's. In Russian, for example, the word for "river" is (written phonetically obviously) rjeka; in Czech (which only partially palatalized its r's and l's) it's r'eka (pronounced, most painfully, "R-zhayka"); while in Polish it's rzeka (pr. "zhayka").

The palatalized "l" in Polish (l') sounds like half of an English "w". Therefore, Wrocl'aw sounds in English like "Vraw-tswahv". (A "c" alone in Polish is pronounced like "ts", but it gets uglier if it's followed by an "i" or a "z", or has a mark over it.) The worst one for Westerners is the city L'ódz, which is pronounced (in English approximation) as "Woodzh".

And yes, the "w" in Polish is pronounced like the English "v".

Hope that helps -
 
Qinshihuangdi:

Like a soft "chin" then "shi, who-wang, di". At least that's how I was taught.

That chin is not like a regular "chin," however, which accounts for the spelling Qin in Pinyin and Ch'in in Wade-Giles. I believe it's more like a cross between chin and tin.
 
Originally posted by Vrylakas
That said, though, I still want to ask a question about Polish. As with all languages, I give Polish names their English equivalents if I know what they are, such as saying 'Warsaw' instead of 'Warszawa'. But I often see--in otherwise English writings, mind you--Polish words that are written with a letter that is unknown to me. It's a bit of a stumbling block, because I can't even guess at a pronunciation to use if there are letters present I don't even know. If there's an ascii code to reproduce the letter here, I don't know it, but it looks like an L with a short line through the middle. What sound does it make? I've just been pronouncing it like an L, like the city 'Wroclaw' (that L is supposed to be the letter in question, but like I said, I don't know how to write it here), I've been pronouncing something like 'Vrock-lahv'. Is that even remotely correct? (The Ws I'm basing on the fact that I've been told 'Warszawa' is pronounced 'Varshava', which leads me to the conclusion that the Polish W has the same sound as the German W.)

I think this is the 2nd time in my life someone has asked me about Polish pronunciation... :love:

It's a bit of a story but essentially the Slavic languages, as they broke into the three distinct groupings we have today (Eastern, Western and Southern) all developed similar characteristics within these groups. In the Western Slavic languages (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Wend/Sorb) a palatalization process took place for the r's and l's. In Russian, for example, the word for "river" is (written phonetically obviously) rjeka; in Czech (which only partially palatalized its r's and l's) it's r'eka (pronounced, most painfully, "R-zhayka"); while in Polish it's rzeka (pr. "zhayka").

The palatalized "l" in Polish (l') sounds like half of an English "w". Therefore, Wrocl'aw sounds in English like "Vraw-tswahv". (A "c" alone in Polish is pronounced like "ts", but it gets uglier if it's followed by an "i" or a "z", or has a mark over it.) The worst one for Westerners is the city L'ódz, which is pronounced (in English approximation) as "Woodzh".

And yes, the "w" in Polish is pronounced like the English "v".

Hope that helps -
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That explains why my grandfather's name, Wladyslaw, it's something like "Vwad-i-swav"....although I probably still mess it up. Never got taught Polish since when I was around, there weren't very many people with any Polish language skills.
 
On second thought, maybe Qinshihuangdi would be more like:

The variation on "chin", then "she, whoahng, dee." Or maybe I'm just overthinking.
 
Originally posted by Loaf Warden


That depends on whether you're using a pure Latin pronunciation or an anglicized pronunciation. The Latin letter V, when used as a consonant, actually made a sound that we represent with W. So a Roman in classical times referring to Veii would have said something more like 'way-ee'. For myself, I can't be bothered with intruding a pure Latin word into an otherwise English sentence, so I simply pronounce it 'vay' and have done with it.
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AHEM! your BOTH forgetting that Veii is an ETRUSCAN city- therfore it dosnt use a latin pronounciation :p
 
though considering I dont know Etruscan, it could be the the excat same pronounciation- although considering we Roman books on grammer, that show there wasn anactual transition of the pronounciation of letter- "Vae" is a correct pronounciat in laitn of around the fourth century I belive (if I remember my basic latin book correctlly)
 
Originally posted by Xen


AHEM! your BOTH forgetting that Veii is an ETRUSCAN city- therfore it dosnt use a latin pronounciation :p
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Actaully Veii is the Roman name for the city therefore it follows the Latin rules of pronounciation (if you can be bothered learning them). IIRC the original Etruscan name for the city is lost or forgotten so no one uses that name.
 
Originally posted by Vrylakas
[BThe palatalized "l" in Polish (l') sounds like half of an English "w". Therefore, Wrocl'aw sounds in English like "Vraw-tswahv". (A "c" alone in Polish is pronounced like "ts", but it gets uglier if it's followed by an "i" or a "z", or has a mark over it.) The worst one for Westerners is the city L'ódz, which is pronounced (in English approximation) as "Woodzh".

Hope that helps - [/B]
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Actually, it helps quite a lot. Thanks for the info. :goodjob: As a non-Polish speaker, I still won't be expected to get it quite right, but at least I can pronounce it 'Vratswahv' and be close enough.

And no, Xen, I didn't forget that Veii is an Etruscan city. But on every list of Etruscan city names I've ever seen, the cities all had distinctly Latin forms. This leads me to the conclusion that the Romans Latinized the Etruscan names, and as far as I know, the form 'Veii' came down to us from Latin*. What form it may have had in Etruscan, I couldn't even guess.

As for the changing Latin pronunciations, I believe that came along with the rise of vernacular languages across Europe, as each region started pronouncing Latin, no longer the standard mode of communication for the common folk, as though it were the same language they were already speaking. So by then, everybody was pronouncing the letter V the same way we do today, because that's how their own languages worked. On the other hand, if all the Latin-based languages changed the V to essentially the same sound, then the change had to come from somewhere, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Attila's archnemesis, Flavius Aetius, very much a native speaker of Latin, was pronouncing his own name 'flah-vee-us' instead of 'flah-wee-oos'. But I had assumed, perhaps wrongly, that we were talking about classical Latin, such as, say, Cicero would have been using, in which V was still the equivalent of the English W and U. Like I said, I pronounce the word 'vay' because that's how it works now. All I meant was that Cicero et al. would not recognize that noise as the name of a city near Rome, but that we do today.

*Edit: Aww, Mongoloid Cow beat me to it. Ah well; I'll let my comments stand anyway.
 
Originally posted by Loaf Warden
That depends on whether you're using a pure Latin pronunciation or an anglicized pronunciation. The Latin letter V, when used as a consonant, actually made a sound that we represent with W.
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Yeah, you obviously know your stuff because I was never even taught that v is pronounced as w until my third year of studying Latin. I should have said "way-ee."
 
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