Gonna admit this; I make this thread a tradition whenever I'm new on a webcomic site's forum or whatnot since OCT-16-2019 (the day I posted this on Tapas Forum).
If you saw me and a thread like this on another {webcomic site's} forum, you'd probably know what it's about already based on the title. 😁
But if you're not familiar… people seem to be confused on how one of my character's name is pronounced. If your characters' first and last names are normal, that's fine; though, what if they're so different, they're hard to pronounce?
My robot sheriff character will teach his pronunciation first.
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
How do you pronounce your characters' names?
On a slightly unrelated note, I remember I was having trouble coming up with a name for her, and asked some people to pitch ideas to me, and "Levana" was one that a friend of mine suggested. It actually means "moon" in Hebrew, but I just thought it looked and read like a most excellent name for a vampire.
The major problematic word in my work continues to be Robofemoid.
It's become a running joke that people just can't or just won't pronounce it right and have to be corrected.
It's ro-bo-FEM-oid.
Heck, even Belinda Brandon fumbles over it the first few times.
Then there's Muukoff from Interstellar Battle Girls. The inspiration for the name was muu-muu which in Hawaiian is pronounced moo-oo-moo-oo. So he'd be Moo-oo-koff. But it could just as well be Moo-uk-off. He answers to both. It's a big galaxy with a lot of dialects and pronunciation and then there are alien species trying to wrap their vocalizing physiology around human words.
I don't usually stress too much over name pronunciations. I have a somewhat odd name in real life that is constantly mispronounced so I've just gotten used to answering to whatever and feel basically the same about my characters.
That said, there was one instance where I wanted to stress the pronunciation of a character's name. One of my comics includes an invented language and many names are derived from this invented language. When it came to giving a name to a character who didn't have one in universe, I decided to go back to the language and pull up a word I'd used previously to make it into a name. This resulted in the traumatized and depressed character being given the name "Dirj". I imagine most English speakers (myself included) default to pronouncing it like the word "Dirge" which is ENTIRELY too on the nose and not what I was intending, haha! So I put a little explainer in the notes about the word the name was derived from and that because of that the pronunciation is actually closer to "Deerzsh".
…can't blame people who read it the other way, though. My own fault, haha!
"Deerzsh" actually does have a neat sound to it!
In real life however, the only issue I ever face is that nobody can spell my last name correctly, because it's not the official spelling. It used to be ScarbOrough, with the extra O, but as I understand it, when either my dad or his dad enlisted in the military, they misspelled it and left the extra O off of his personnel records, and it just legally remained that way since then . . . there is no extra O in my name, but many people tend to want to spell it that way . . . and those who don't just don't know how to spell it, so I've seen various other spellings, such as "Scarbro", "Scarbrow," and once even a "Scharborough."
Otherwise, there are plenty of people who want to call me "Joe," even though that's not my preference, but at the same time, I'm not a snob, so if people really want to call me "Joe," I just let them. I've been called worse.
Well, for one, the name of Bodhjan the voiceless (The protagonist of my first I:tI story Pulsewarriors) is intended to be pronounced "Bow-John" more or less. And the name of the antagonist, Iozomah the Third, is intended to be pronounced "Juice-O-Ma" more or less. And, yes - for those incidently thinking it - she is a very, very juicy ma as far as interterrestrial matriarchs go^^
I like to give my characters pretty pun-rich names, so the name tends to be pronunced the way of the word the pun alludes to. Example of my current avatar:
Iddy Crystar (Kitty + Crying Star. So Iddy is pronuned like Kitty minus the K, and Crystar literally like crying star, minus the -ing.)
Thoguh I can imagine my more exotic names trip up a lot of English speakers as my names are often based on German pronounciations. Like say, a German E would be pronunced like the English A (like in bake or take). Example from a current series:
Elyssa Omari (Elyssa would be closer to Alyssa, and Omari would be an English E at the end, the German I is pronounced like the English E.)
Whoa, mega late response! All of you have great sounding name pronunciations (and meanings behind them as well)! Let’s see here…
bravo1102 wrote:
The major problematic word in my work continues to be Robofemoid.
It's become a running joke that people just can't or just won't pronounce it right and have to be corrected.
It's ro-bo-FEM-oid.
As a “robot sheriff”, I would only forget that there’s no ‘T’ next to ‘robo’. I would pronounce that word perfectly besides that.
bravo1102 wrote:
Then there's Muukoff from Interstellar Battle Girls. The inspiration for the name was muu-muu which in Hawaiian is pronounced moo-oo-moo-oo. So he'd be Moo-oo-koff. But it could just as well be Moo-uk-off. He answers to both. It's a big galaxy with a lot of dialects and pronunciation and then there are alien species trying to wrap their vocalizing physiology around human words.
So it’s Moo-oo-koff. Long ‘moo” with a dash and th- Wait… there’s two pronunciations to that name? Huh…
Also, I’d like to visit that planet with multiple dialects (as long as I don’t be get confused like crazy, heh heh). Maybe I can be a Simple English tutor to the alien {specie}s and hope they’ll remember our language easily.
dragonsong12 wrote:
"Deerzsh".
J_Scarbrough wrote:
"Deerzsh" actually does have a neat sound to it!
Agreed with Scarbrough! That is a nifty sounding name!
J_Scarbrough wrote:
In real life however, the only issue I ever face is that nobody can spell my last name correctly, because it's not the official spelling. It used to be ScarbOrough, with the extra O, but as I understand it, when either my dad or his dad enlisted in the military, they misspelled it and left the extra O off of his personnel records, and it just legally remained that way since then . . . there is no extra O in my name, but many people tend to want to spell it that way . . . and those who don't just don't know how to spell it, so I've seen various other spellings, such as "Scarbro", "Scarbrow," and once even a "Scharborough."
Otherwise, there are plenty of people who want to call me "Joe," even though that's not my preference, but at the same time, I'm not a snob, so if people really want to call me "Joe," I just let them. I've been called worse.
Hey, you know, I prefer to call you by your last name anyway – extra ‘o’ or no extra ‘o’. Your last name appears special, like how it reminds me of Mark Mothersbaugh{‘s last name}.
TheJagged wrote:
I like to give my characters pretty pun-rich names, so the name tends to be pronunced the way of the word the pun alludes to.
Elyssa Omari (Elyssa would be closer to Alyssa, and Omari would be an English E at the end, the German I is pronounced like the English E.)
Hmm… very interesting. Elyssa (A sounding at the beginning) would sound like a medieval {young} princess' name. Good choice!
I chose my first names as an uncreative user name partly because I wanted to have one that's tolerably pronounceable in English. My last name isn't, the one nickname I ever had (but has never caught on in the long run) makes no sense without a translation, which in turn wouldn't work properly.
Also, I knew I'd never come up with a good pen name for myself, only for others. To me, this kind of thing must be awarded to you by friends, acquaintances and/or family, or it won't be the real deal.
My comic is set in Northern Germany and has a Plattdütsch version, in fact originated as such. It has no original language, as I come up with gags in both and translate the rest around it as needed. My characters have the same names in both versions; I figured Plattdütsch, which is actually related to English and uses almost the same sound system, could not possibly be harder than Japanese, say, and hardly any webcomic reader seems to mind Japanese pronunciations (I'm told it has some similarities with Finnish, and in Finnish only everything other than pronunciation is hard to learn, while in Japanese it's everything except for the grammar… where was I? Oh right!)
So Gundula's U's are pronounced like the u's in "bush" or "put"; the a is an "ah" and once you've sorted out the vowels the rest comes by itself - or would I have needed to mention that both in German and in Platt the g is always as one in "get" or "egg", no exceptions? Thought so.
Sophie in Platt is basically like the English name Sophie, only with a short o ("lot").
Not in German, though. In German, the stress would move to the second syllable, but everything else would stay the same.
Christian becomes "KRI-shawn" in Platt, where he's also accordingly spelled as Krischan. Much easier than the German "KRIST-ee-ahn", I'd like to think.
Once upon a time I included a pronunciation guide on my character sheets, but I also said that that's only for those who really feel they need to know and that I'm actually cool with every pronunciation you feel comfortable with. The comic had been online for quite a number of years when I gave these pronunciation hints and I didn't want anyone to feel forced to try and break well-established habits.
I admit, though, that I couldn't quite help grinning at some attempts at pronouncing the Plattdütsch comic title (Gundula un de Stuventiger) I heard. But I'd like to stress it was a respectful grin.
Btw.: all g's as in "get" (see above), a as a long "aah" (see above), and the first three u's as the "bush"-u (see above), BUT the u in Stuventiger as oo ("moon", "balloon"); also, the i as ee ("need", "peat"). For the "er" imagine you were talking with a British BBC-newsreader-accent (actually, just about any Southern English or West Countries dialect will do). Do all of that, and nobody will be able to tell the difference to a native Platt speaker.
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