Tag Archives: Pronunciation

Uncategorized

Words spoken and misunderstood

6 Comments
Radio Announcer Markus Rautio in the studio, ca. 1930. Photo credit: Yle Archives. Unsplash license.

This continues to be a strange time in my disordered life. I’m still feeling the effects of finishing my great life project. There’s no reason I can’t start another great project, of course. Or several smaller ones. One must fill one’s time after all. Sedentary though I am by nature, my brain, I find, needs to be doing stuff. So I drag myself out of bed at 6:30 a.m. and (for the present) work on the art and science of book narration. I’m taking it in small steps, as Jordan Peterson recommends, laboring to overcome my technophobia through familiarization. And it’s working. I am getting more accustomed to it. For the present I’m just recording the instructional book I bought, to desensitize myself to the hardware and the software and the protocols. But I now begin to dimly envision myself actually recording one of my books. Or several. The Epsom books – I still think I’ll need to acquire an Irishman for the Erling series.

Here’s a thought of no importance whatever: It actually relates to narration – as narration is a branch of the broader field of voice acting and announcing. And I’m an old radio hand – best copy reader in my broadcast school class, worst recording engineer.

When I was but a wee tot, I used to hear announcers on the radio telling me that such and such a program was “brought to you by XXXXXX Company.”

And – this was before I knew how to read or spell – I heard the word “brought” as “brokt.” Once I did learn to spell, a few years later, I found that the word in fact did have a couple letters inside it that would work for the “k” sound, sort of – the “gh.” But I also learned that the “gh” wasn’t pronounced. The word was pronounced simply “brot.”

But recently, while watching a couple series on Amazon Prime (“Reacher” Season 3 and “The House of David,” since you ask) I heard the announcer saying that at least one of these programs was brought to me by… I forget what company. But I am certain she (it was a she) in fact pronounced the word “brokt.” So that the phrasing went “brok to you.”

The “gh” in “brought,” of course, is a residue of obsolete pronunciation. Whenever we find such strange, unused letters in an English word, they’re usually the shadow of a past genuine pronunciation. In olden times, the word was in fact pronounced something like “brokt.” Or “brocht.”

I wonder if that pronunciation by professional announcers (I am adamant that’s what they’re saying; I’m not just delusional) harkens unconsciously back to that antique English. Or maybe its just the way the human tongue naturally curls when set to the work of pronouncing those particular sounds.

I clearly remember ads on that same station (it was the Faribault, Minnesota station, specializing in Old Time [that means oompah] music, advertising Lockwood Auto Company. But I remember that I heard it as Lockwood “L-O” Company. That one, I’ll grant you, I got wrong. Made no sense at all, but when you’re a kid lots of things don’t make sense.

Writing

Writer’s journal: Character lists and pronunciations

Leave a comment
King Olaf discovers a young man’s “treachery,” a scene I use in The Baldur Game: Illustration for Heimskringla by Christian Krogh.

First of all, I need to correct myself. I’m a little surprised nobody has rebuked me on the point already in comments. No doubt that’s because our readers are highly sensitive and polite people.

In a previous post, I called the list I’m working on right now, for my upcoming novel, The Baldur Game, an index of characters. It’s not an index. It’s just a list. Every index starts as a list, and the process reminded me of indexing. But to be an index, my list would have to specify pages on which the names are found, and doing that would be just making work for myself. Writing a deathless epic is plenty to do already, without such excess exertion.

The really hard part of the character list is the name pronunciations. I discussed that challenge earlier too. How many different ways are there to pronounce Saga Age names? You can use the pronunciations the top scholars use – the ones recreated on the basis of known linguistic laws concerning vowel shifts and the softening of consonants (there’s a name for that, but I can’t recall it. And it hardly seems worth the effort to look it up, even on the internet. Grimm’s Law enters into it, I know – and yes, it’s the same Grimms you’ve heard of, the ones who collected fairy tales). But nobody understands those scholarly pronunciations. I’m inclined to think, in my cattier moments, that the scholars themselves just use them to intimidate us.

Then you can use contemporary Icelandic pronunciation. But I’d have to master Icelandic pronunciation to do that, and it would sound strange to my readers, who are English speakers by and large.

And you can use contemporary Norwegian pronunciation. That’s more or less what I do, as the possessor of a middling facility with Norwegian. But you can only go so far with that too. I can do no more than suggest characteristic Scandinavian diphthongs that don’t exist in English. I fear my attempts won’t entirely please my Norwegian friends and family. My relatives in Rogaland, for instance, pronounce the name Einar something like “AY-nar,” but I make it “EYE-nar,” like Kirk Douglas does in the Vikings movie. Because I don’t want to challenge my American readers’ patience too much. Not when I’m expecting them to plow through my prose too.

The bottom line is that I’m unsatisfied with my pronunciations – and if I changed them I’m pretty sure I’d still be unsatisfied.

It looks like there’ll be a small delay in getting the book finally published. One collaborator, whose contribution can’t be omitted, is being delayed due to multiple obligations.

Still, I have a few things left to do. I need to make some more Photoshop additions to my map – locations mentioned in the book.

I could do another read-through, of course, but my instincts tell me no. I’ll give it one more reading before it’s published, but I think that should be the last step. There comes a point when you’re just rearranging the furniture in a manuscript, changing words and then changing them back. I suspect Frank Herbert was thinking as an author when he inserted an invented quotation in Dune that said (as I recall it): “Arakis teaches the maxim of the knife, cutting off that which is incomplete and saying, ‘Now it is complete because it ends here.’”

Any work of man can be “improved” indefinitely. At some point you’ve just got to let the baby be born already.