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How to say some Nightrunner names (if Skalan = Ancient Greek)
About two weeks ago, I wrote up a big huge Nightrunner linguistics meta post and submitted it to the comm on LJ. Unfortunately, since it contained an external link (to an audio clip of me saying some names), it was shuffled away, waiting for moderator approval.
I waited a bit in case she was going to get around to it, but I think it just went unnoticed. So this time I'm posting the external links on my journal post, and linking to my journal post. Problem solved. :P
On a sleepless night not unlike this one, after reading some of Mary Renault's work and realizing that Skala is based heavily off Ancient Greece, a thought suddenly occurred to me: are Skalan names Greek?
Linguistics being one of my dorky loves, I sped off to the Wikipedia page on Ancient Greek phonology to find that the Nightrunner names were wonderfully consistent.So in the middle of a vacation, I was there in a hotel near New York, trying to teach myself how to say some names in Ancient Greek at 4 AM on the day of my birthday. Do I get nerd/loser cred?
With that in mind, if "modern" Skalan is indeed Ancient Greek, here's a few speculative name pronunciations.
This is a list in IPA, with an audio clip at the end. It is meant to show up correctly in the font Doulos SIL. Don't worry about the written list if you don't know what that is, and don't try to use it as a pronunciation guide if you can't read IPA, since many letters are not read how they look. (For example, y is like the German u-with-umlaut.)
(* means I had to guess at the accented syllable. Syllable boundaries are noted only where it could conceivably be ambiguous.)
Nysander [ny.ˈsan.dɛɾ]*
Thero [ˈtʰɛro]*
Rhíminee [ˈr̥imineː]
Idrilain [i.dɾi.ˈla͡in]*
Phoria [ˈɸo.ɾi.a]*
Korathan [ko.ra.ˈtʰan]*
Klia [ˈkli.a]
Magyana [ma.gy.ˈa.na]*
Myrhichia [my.r̥i.ˈkʰi.a]*
Audio clip of this list with my dorky voice and crappy accent: Here.
Caveat: I've studied zero Greek, just linguistics.
Dorky notes: I have no idea if /r/ reduces to [ɾ], but in many languages it does and frankly it's easier to say that way. The vowels are probably not exactly where they should be placed, but I doubt anyone knows where they should be. I supplemented the wiki page with this one for some nuances about vowels. I am a native English speaker and naturally want to do a dynamic stress accent and recorded each name well over twenty times to try to rid myself of that and have a pitch accent only, but it probably isn't perfect.
Alec and Seregil aren't on the list because neither of them have Skalan names. :P
You might ask, why do I think Skalan is Ancient Greek?
The cultural similarities made me suspect it (such as the shaving of horses' manes in Tamir for mourning), but what really cinched it is that Skalan names all match up with the peculiarities of Greek. For example, Ancient Greek doesn't have the vowel /u/ as in "moon", and instead has /y/ as in "über" (said the German way, not the loanword way). And what do you get in modern Skalan names? No u's, and a ton of y's. Also, Greek syllables can only end in a vowel, s, r, or n. Skalan once again behaves. And the consonants match up and everything. Also, according to google, Lynn Flewelling studied Ancient Greek in college. :P So hey, I think it's a good a theory as any.
I keep saying "modern" Skalan for this reason: there are some Skalan names with u's in them, but they're exclusively ancient.
For example, Nysander's full name is "Nysander i Azusthra Hypirius Meksandor Illandi." (I'm assuming here that Nysander's father is Skalan, which might not actually be a safe bet.) However, he's pushing three hundred, which puts his forefathers in a far earlier age.
In the Tamir Triad, we have Erius and Kirothius. But the Tamir Triad is supposed to take place either about 500 or 600 years ago depending on who you believe.* Language -- and vowels -- can change significantly in that time.
*500 = 200 from Arkoniel's writing at the beginning of Bone Doll's Twin + 300 for Nysander's age. 600 = reference in Luck in the Shadows.
I tried to find something about Greek more ancient than Classical Ancient Greek and found Mycenean Greek, but there's very little we know about it. I actually lean toward Koine Greek from the age of Alexander the Great, which came after Ancient Greek IRL, but is something we know about, and also on a very shallow level I'm deeply suspicious of the "the Great" nickname.
But I'm sure some of you are wondering, what about Aurenfaie?
I have no idea about Aurenfaie.
Approaching it from the language itself
It's not Ancient Greek or any version of Greek more modern than that, because we have names like Korit that end in a /t/. The strongest hint we have toward phonology is Seregil's little pronunciation lesson from Luck in the Shadows: "Ser-ah-gill," and thanks to English orthography being a nuisance, the first part's still ambiguous between sound like "sir" and "s + air". One might argue it's the latter because she'd have written sir otherwise, but one can also argue that it's very odd for that r to belong to the first syllable instead of the second unless she meant the er vowel.
If she did mean "sir," that would help narrow it down if it's a real language. We English speakers might think errr is a perfectly normal sound to make, but it actually occurs in less than 1% of the language in the world.
Approaching it from the culture
My gut feeling says: hey, these are Tolkien's elves. And Tolkien's Elvish certainly looks familiar: it has all the marks over vowels that you see in Aurënfaie, which is a good start. It would be impossible to rigorously compare this hunch, as there is not a complete description of any variety of Tolkien Elvishbut I have a feeling that a lot of Aurenfaie vocabulary and syntax is made up on the spot.
Before this, I had entertained the idea that it might be Celtic (traditionally Elven and middleearthy!) or Persian (due to their storied interaction with the Greeks) but neither looked like a fit.
Pleminarian and Retha'noi? Not touching those. Not enough information, by far.
For the record, I just say names like any other speaker of English when I'm talking about the series. I'm just putting this up here for curiosity's/enthusiasm's sake.
Also, a caveat: Matching languages to fictional countries is a very different task than anything one might do in real life.
Any opinions/input/corrections welcome! :D (I don't suppose anyone here's studied Ancient Greek?)
EDIT 12/15/12: After having studied Indo-European, I feel confident concluding that an older form of Greek would indeed have had -u-. It's also worth noting that my pronunciation of Thero and Phoria are slightly inconsistent -- either it's like "tero" and "poria", or "thero" and "foria" as those changes happened at about the same time.
By the way, Aurenfaie appears to be Indo-European -- see "dwai sholo" for "two bowls" -- "dwai" is a very Indo-European looking word for two.
I waited a bit in case she was going to get around to it, but I think it just went unnoticed. So this time I'm posting the external links on my journal post, and linking to my journal post. Problem solved. :P
On a sleepless night not unlike this one, after reading some of Mary Renault's work and realizing that Skala is based heavily off Ancient Greece, a thought suddenly occurred to me: are Skalan names Greek?
Linguistics being one of my dorky loves, I sped off to the Wikipedia page on Ancient Greek phonology to find that the Nightrunner names were wonderfully consistent.
With that in mind, if "modern" Skalan is indeed Ancient Greek, here's a few speculative name pronunciations.
This is a list in IPA, with an audio clip at the end. It is meant to show up correctly in the font Doulos SIL. Don't worry about the written list if you don't know what that is, and don't try to use it as a pronunciation guide if you can't read IPA, since many letters are not read how they look. (For example, y is like the German u-with-umlaut.)
(* means I had to guess at the accented syllable. Syllable boundaries are noted only where it could conceivably be ambiguous.)
Nysander [ny.ˈsan.dɛɾ]*
Thero [ˈtʰɛro]*
Rhíminee [ˈr̥imineː]
Idrilain [i.dɾi.ˈla͡in]*
Phoria [ˈɸo.ɾi.a]*
Korathan [ko.ra.ˈtʰan]*
Klia [ˈkli.a]
Magyana [ma.gy.ˈa.na]*
Myrhichia [my.r̥i.ˈkʰi.a]*
Audio clip of this list with my dorky voice and crappy accent: Here.
Caveat: I've studied zero Greek, just linguistics.
Dorky notes: I have no idea if /r/ reduces to [ɾ], but in many languages it does and frankly it's easier to say that way. The vowels are probably not exactly where they should be placed, but I doubt anyone knows where they should be. I supplemented the wiki page with this one for some nuances about vowels. I am a native English speaker and naturally want to do a dynamic stress accent and recorded each name well over twenty times to try to rid myself of that and have a pitch accent only, but it probably isn't perfect.
Alec and Seregil aren't on the list because neither of them have Skalan names. :P
You might ask, why do I think Skalan is Ancient Greek?
The cultural similarities made me suspect it (such as the shaving of horses' manes in Tamir for mourning), but what really cinched it is that Skalan names all match up with the peculiarities of Greek. For example, Ancient Greek doesn't have the vowel /u/ as in "moon", and instead has /y/ as in "über" (said the German way, not the loanword way). And what do you get in modern Skalan names? No u's, and a ton of y's. Also, Greek syllables can only end in a vowel, s, r, or n. Skalan once again behaves. And the consonants match up and everything. Also, according to google, Lynn Flewelling studied Ancient Greek in college. :P So hey, I think it's a good a theory as any.
I keep saying "modern" Skalan for this reason: there are some Skalan names with u's in them, but they're exclusively ancient.
For example, Nysander's full name is "Nysander i Azusthra Hypirius Meksandor Illandi." (I'm assuming here that Nysander's father is Skalan, which might not actually be a safe bet.) However, he's pushing three hundred, which puts his forefathers in a far earlier age.
In the Tamir Triad, we have Erius and Kirothius. But the Tamir Triad is supposed to take place either about 500 or 600 years ago depending on who you believe.* Language -- and vowels -- can change significantly in that time.
*500 = 200 from Arkoniel's writing at the beginning of Bone Doll's Twin + 300 for Nysander's age. 600 = reference in Luck in the Shadows.
I tried to find something about Greek more ancient than Classical Ancient Greek and found Mycenean Greek, but there's very little we know about it. I actually lean toward Koine Greek from the age of Alexander the Great, which came after Ancient Greek IRL, but is something we know about, and also on a very shallow level I'm deeply suspicious of the "the Great" nickname.
But I'm sure some of you are wondering, what about Aurenfaie?
I have no idea about Aurenfaie.
Approaching it from the language itself
It's not Ancient Greek or any version of Greek more modern than that, because we have names like Korit that end in a /t/. The strongest hint we have toward phonology is Seregil's little pronunciation lesson from Luck in the Shadows: "Ser-ah-gill," and thanks to English orthography being a nuisance, the first part's still ambiguous between sound like "sir" and "s + air". One might argue it's the latter because she'd have written sir otherwise, but one can also argue that it's very odd for that r to belong to the first syllable instead of the second unless she meant the er vowel.
If she did mean "sir," that would help narrow it down if it's a real language. We English speakers might think errr is a perfectly normal sound to make, but it actually occurs in less than 1% of the language in the world.
Approaching it from the culture
My gut feeling says: hey, these are Tolkien's elves. And Tolkien's Elvish certainly looks familiar: it has all the marks over vowels that you see in Aurënfaie, which is a good start. It would be impossible to rigorously compare this hunch, as there is not a complete description of any variety of Tolkien Elvish
Before this, I had entertained the idea that it might be Celtic (traditionally Elven and middleearthy!) or Persian (due to their storied interaction with the Greeks) but neither looked like a fit.
Pleminarian and Retha'noi? Not touching those. Not enough information, by far.
For the record, I just say names like any other speaker of English when I'm talking about the series. I'm just putting this up here for curiosity's/enthusiasm's sake.
Also, a caveat: Matching languages to fictional countries is a very different task than anything one might do in real life.
Any opinions/input/corrections welcome! :D (I don't suppose anyone here's studied Ancient Greek?)
EDIT 12/15/12: After having studied Indo-European, I feel confident concluding that an older form of Greek would indeed have had -u-. It's also worth noting that my pronunciation of Thero and Phoria are slightly inconsistent -- either it's like "tero" and "poria", or "thero" and "foria" as those changes happened at about the same time.
By the way, Aurenfaie appears to be Indo-European -- see "dwai sholo" for "two bowls" -- "dwai" is a very Indo-European looking word for two.
no subject
I think your theory is valid, I often thought so myself - didn't Lynn Flewelling even say once that she based Skala on ancient Greek society?? (I might have also dreamt that, who knows ^^)
And, I have not studied Ancient Greek, but my studies included linguistics and I took this class once where we all should have been able to read and speak Ancient Greek *cough* (I was there out of pure curiosity), so I think that you did a really, really great job *thumbs up* :D
no subject
Eee, and thanks for the endorsement. :D
no subject