When I was in school, I enjoyed diagramming sentences and making proper use of the subjunctive mood. Spelling was one of my favorite subjects and I used to proudly tell anyone who would listen that I only ever spelled one word wrong on a spelling test during my entire elementary school career (Tuesday, if you can believe it). I was (am?) that annoying kid who corrected other people's grammar – and pronunciation.
Consequently, I absolutely adored Frank Mentzer's article, "Ay pronunseeAYshun gyd," which appeared in issue #93 of Dragon (January 1985). Over the course of five pages, Mentzer sets out to present the correct pronunciations for some of the weirder and more obscure words and names found in Dungeons & Dragons and AD&D materials. Of course, Mentzer is quick to note that he personally doesn't believe there is such a thing as a "right" or a "wrong" pronunciation (or spelling). Thus, the pronunciations he offers in the article are simply the "preferred" or even "most common" rather than the correct ones. Such descriptivist nonsense didn't hold any water with me when I was fifteen and it holds even less now, but I feel it's important to mention Mentzer's comment nonetheless, since I'm sure someone will bring it up in the comments in order to defend the rectitude of his idiosyncratic pronunciation of lich or drow or whatever.
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| Apropos of nothing, I assure you. |
While linguistic prescriptivism is obviously and self-evidently nonsense, I found the appended chart interesting. Especially the provided pronunciation for sea elf god on line two, and the crazy Abyss dwarves on line eight. I should check out the article some time to see if Mentzer went into detail about why he went with the pronunciations he did.
ReplyDeleteSome, like Deva, I can see obvious reasons for (it's a real word, even if I always pronounced it the Persian way and not the Sanskrit way, which is inappropriate give that D&D deva are good aligned). Others seem less obvious to me.
I'll admit to have being bugged by other people's pronounciation of 'gaseous' for decades - but the internet tells me today that my pronounciation is British and theirs American.
ReplyDeleteI know that our Cthulhu pronunciations don't always match the guides in Chaosium publications and we're happy with that. But I do pay attention when a setting includes such guides (Tekumel, Harn).
In the adjacent hobby of wargaming, my current irk is a friend's saying something like hex-a-GO-nal.
On a related note, life has taught me that in general RPG treatment of languages was/is a lost opportunity. The widespread use of “common tongue” in so many games foreclosed great opportunities for better gaming. Put language difficulties front and center for a more engaging adventure. A few ideas follow.
ReplyDeleteThe DM can really enhance NPC character development and add a sense of “foreignness” by expressing their comments in English but with foreign syntax. For example, put the adjective after the noun and put the verb at the end of the sentence. So, instead of an NPC saying, “We explored the red house,” how about, “We the house of red explored,” or “The house of red we did explore.”
How many times has your party used the spell comprehend languages? Back in the day, never. Nowadays, from time to time. Just imagine what a difference that spell would have made in the 1800s as European explorers puzzled over Egyptian hieroglyphics. Or, what about an adventure to recover something like the Rosetta Stone? So many great opportunities for adventure follow from language issues.
Separately, I remember that most annoying cover of Dragon #93 and the unusual Gypsy caravan adventure inside.
Yeah, that figure on the cover looks like it's straight out of "An American Werewolf in London."
DeleteReminds me, at age 9, with my friends, arguing if it was Mee-Lee, May-Lay, May-Lee, or Mel-Ee. It's easy to forget how expansive the vocabulary was, even in the Basic set.
ReplyDeleteTeusday. I also, embarrassingly enough, misspelled this commonly used word. In my ultra-nerdy defense, I knew Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were named after the Germanic gods. Well, Tuesday was “Tewe’s Day” (Tyr, to the Norse), so I put the ‘e’ before the ‘I’.
ReplyDeleteUgh!
My group had so many nerdly mispronounced terms I did not even try to police them. Nearly all of the ones I caught drove me crazy, but not crazy enough to correct them: we had awfully anachronistic "motive cocktails" (Molotov cocktails) made from flasks of oil and a seemingly endless supply of rags, "faaltchians" (falchions), and for years I believed Ravenloft was set in Bavaria (and in fact, thought it was really cool that somehow our party had planewalked into the real world through the fog that separated our worlds) simply from having a DM who misread Barovia.
ReplyDeleteThe "motive cocktails" made me particularly insane. Aside from, I believe, the Boot Hill conversions in the DM's Guide, Gary banned explosives, and a little burning oil simply should not have wroth such havoc against our fire-sensitive foes. Moreover, a more appropriate weapon would have been specialized naptha pots, particularly against heavily armored opponents, but we were such Gygaxian adherents that we only introduced weapons that could be mashed up from existing lists. But we were not Gygaxian enough to limit ourselves from a supply of flasks that just was magically available every time we wanted to do 1-4 pts of damage plus a chance to burn everything to the ground. When I wasn't DM, no one was held to very good accounting and inventory standards.
I remember flaming oil as an available weapon without class restriction in Ultima 3 or 4
DeleteSeason 1 of Stranger Things would have added another layer of verisimilitude had they merely had an argument about the pronunciation of demogorgon, and only settled in in Season 3, when this issue of Dragon came out. THAT would have been funny.
ReplyDeleteI was just happy that Frank rhymed drow with cow and not with low.
ReplyDelete"Such descriptivist nonsense didn't hold any water with me when I was fifteen and it holds even less now." James, I've always known that you were on the side of the angels and once again, you've not failed to make my heart glad.
ReplyDeleteN.B. I remember, hated, and still hate that particular Dragon cover.
I used to pronounce drow to rhyme with row, but then I learned that it's supposed to rhyme with row....
ReplyDeleteMy high school was 'fed' by 3 middle-schools. So my freshman year it seemed like Christmas in June when my gaming group discovered another gaming group that had gone to one of the other middle-schools.
ReplyDeleteThe shine quickly wore off though when we found out our 2 groups would be forever divided over how to pronounce 'drow' (whether it rhymed with 'now' or 'grow')