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 gets long, and I babble about 'old' Skalan and some other language dorkery. )
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 gets long, and I babble about 'old' Skalan and some other language dorkery. )
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.
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