There's been quite a number of words from Dìqiú-native languages thrown about in the past few pieces, and not having seen ANY Avatar in any form, I have no real clue how to pronounce them. I know I can listen to the audio versions to hear them, but that only helps if I remember them later. Can you please post a pronunciation guide for those of us who have no clue what things should sound like?

Thanks,
Offsides

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#include <stdsig.h>

>There's been quite a number of words from Dìqiú-native
>languages thrown about in the past few pieces, and not having seen ANY
>Avatar in any form, I have no real clue how to pronounce them. I know
>I can listen to the audio versions to hear them, but that only helps
>if I remember them later. Can you please post a pronunciation guide
>for those of us who have no clue what things should sound like?

Chinese romanization is a pretty weird business, I'll grant you - who would know from looking at "Dìqiú" that it's pronounced "DEEcho"? - but it's a little outside my field to review the material in hopes of predicting which words are specifically tripping you up. If you can provide a list of the ones you're curious about, I can try to hook you up.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

... well, shit. I've been pronouncing it "Di-shoe", with the di- like in "dish." It'll take awhile to unlearn that.

-Merc
Keep Rat

>Chinese romanization is a pretty weird business, I'll grant you

It's far more consistent than English's use of the alphabet, honestly.

> - who
>would know from looking at "Dìqiú" that it's pronounced
>"DEEcho"?

Dee-chyo, actually. The -iu is a contraction of -iou, which is pronounced "yo" (basically); since there's no syllable that sounds like "yu" in Mandarin, and hanyu pinyin is big on the economy of letters, the "o" is omitted. (Similar to how "-ui" is pronounced like English "way" -- it's basically "uei" with the "e" omitted.)

Essentially, you can get by knowing these:

Consonants: Q and ch are both "ch" sounds (they're actually not the same sound, but they're very hard to distinguish for most monolingual English speakers), and x and sh are both "sh" sounds. J is a hard "j" like in "just," never a "zh" sound (that's spelled "zh"). G is always a hard "g", like in "girl," never the "j" sound. C is "ts" sound, like the "ts" at the end of "cats"; z is the same sound, but voiced (like, say, "ds" at the end of "lads"), but in this context it's fine to leave it unvoiced. The rest are close enough to English consonants you'll be okay going that way.

Vowels: i is usually "ee" by itself, but when it's the sole letter following the consonants z-, c-, s-, zh-, ch-, sh- or r- in a syllable, it's more like an "er" sound. When i is followed by other vowels in a syllable, it becomes a consonantal "y," essentially.

a is basically English father. This is always true; -ang always like "song" (give or take), never "sang" (past tense of "sing").

e is an "uh" (schwa) sound in most contexts.

o is never by itself; if the long "o" is a syllable's vowel sound, it's written as "ou".

u by itself is an "oo" sound, like English "rude", and never ever implies the "y" sound in, say, English "cute" (that's i's job). If "u" is followed by another vowel, it becomes a "w."

ü is kinda tricky for English speakers, since it's not used in most English dialects; it's like an "ee" sound but with lips rounded.

For most vowel digraphs, if you know Japanese romaji orthography, you'll be able to get close enough to not drive people who've studied Chinese batty. The two gotchas I mentioned upthread: "-iu" ("yo") and "ui" ("-way").

Lastly, diacritics: the macron (overbar), acute accent (ˊ), caron (ˇ), and grave accent (`) mark tone: flat tone, rising tone, falling-rising tone, and falling tone, respectively. These are really really important; tones affect lexical meaning (the only difference, in pronunciation, between "horse" and "mother" is tone), not just semantics as in English. The fifth tone (neutral) has no diacritic.

Wikipedia article on pinyin for more info.

---

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

---

>>Chinese romanization is a pretty weird business, I'll grant you
>
>It's far more consistent than English's use of the alphabet, honestly.

Most things are.

Polychrome

Well, uh, there you go, I guess. That's very comprehensive. More comprehensive than I have actually been in determining the local words for places and things in Dìqiú.

Mind you, not all the words from Dìqiú we've seen have been from Tongyu (Chinese); a good many have been Tukisi (which is derived from Inuktitut, usually the dialect spoken in eastern Nunavut) or Kokugo (essentially Japanese), both of which have different rules.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I think I'm going to stick with the original way I read it in my head, which sounds like "D. Q.", even though it's wrong. 'Cause that's the way it would sound if it was more like Latin, and because it's funnier if it sounds like Corwin and Utena went to the Dairy Queen for their honeymoon.