How strange is it not to have non-English phonemes?

[zompist]

I find it interesting to compare this situation with Tolkien. He, of course, was the opposite, having had very determined views about phonaesthetics, down to the aforementioned diaereses on final ⟨-e⟩ to ensure their correct pronunciation.

You only get the correct pronunciations, however, if you read LOTR's Appendix E; I expect most readers get quite a few of the names wrong. It also doesn't help that he used the Old English convention of using acutes for long vowels.

[bradrn]

I find it interesting to compare this situation with Tolkien. He, of course, was the opposite, having had very determined views about phonaesthetics, down to the aforementioned diaereses on final ⟨-e⟩ to ensure their correct pronunciation.

You only get the correct pronunciations, however, if you read LOTR's Appendix E; I expect most readers get quite a few of the names wrong. It also doesn't help that he used the Old English convention of using acutes for long vowels.

Oh yes, as proved by Celeborn. But it seems that he cared about pronunciation a lot more than Le Guin did. (Come to think about it, he cared a lot more than most conlangers too.)

[foxcatdog]

Japanese can be considered to only contain english phonemes. Of course their is N and gemination, pitch accent and allophony make it difficult to pronounce perfectly.

[sasasha]

It’s not really a criticism of Le Guin; I meant it more as a statement of what I’d like to see from future writers.

Fair enough!

Who knows, maybe Le Guin did indeed work out the Old Speech coherently, and we just have too little information to tell.)

Indeed.

Perhaps… though personally I never got any Celtic vibes from the Old Speech.

IMO it has Welsh-leaning phonology, phonotactics and orthography judging by our very small sampling... There’s even ⟨w⟩ as a vowel letter (or, perhaps, labialisation marker).

I find it interesting to compare this situation with Tolkien. He, of course, was the opposite, having had very determined views about phonaesthetics, down to the aforementioned diaereses on final ⟨-e⟩ to ensure their correct pronunciation.

You only get the correct pronunciations, however, if you read LOTR's Appendix E; I expect most readers get quite a few of the names wrong. It also doesn't help that he used the Old English convention of using acutes for long vowels.

Oh yes, as proved by Celeborn. But it seems that he cared about pronunciation a lot more than Le Guin did. (Come to think about it, he cared a lot more than most conlangers too.)

Yes, but as we all know, he started with conlanging, and moved on to stories later. Le Guin started with anthropology and story was always, from what I can tell, central to her work. I think she had a very strong phonaesthetic sense (as you noted, you can tell a Le Guin naming language a mile off) and a bit of a penchant for the immediate hit of ‘something old’ you get from historical orthographies and medieval calques but, if they ever existed, left any fine details of her conlangs out of her published works.

Probably a smart move, as no doubt they would be submitted to a fair bit of scrutiny ‒ and might detract, rather than add, to the immersiveness of her works. One implication of yours I do agree with is that if you’re going to present a conlang as central to a literary work, you’d better do a very good job.

[Linguoboy]

If you're doing a tabletop RPG, it's probably best not to burden the players with things they can't pronounce. Though as Shamus Young pointed out, if you carefully name a character Abdul ibn Umar Hajji ar-Rahman or whatever... that is, non-English but quite readable... the players will refer to him as "the bearded guy in the palace" anyway.

I can't tell if you meant for this name to look pronounceable but at the same time completely borked in order to make some subsidiary point about foreign names or not.

[bradrn]

If you're doing a tabletop RPG, it's probably best not to burden the players with things they can't pronounce. Though as Shamus Young pointed out, if you carefully name a character Abdul ibn Umar Hajji ar-Rahman or whatever... that is, non-English but quite readable... the players will refer to him as "the bearded guy in the palace" anyway.

I can't tell if you meant for this name to look pronounceable but at the same time completely borked in order to make some subsidiary point about foreign names or not.

Not knowing much about Arab names, what’s wrong with it?

(My guesses would be that Hajji goes at the end and that ar-Rahman can only be used for God, but I don’t really know.)

[Travis B.]

If you're doing a tabletop RPG, it's probably best not to burden the players with things they can't pronounce. Though as Shamus Young pointed out, if you carefully name a character Abdul ibn Umar Hajji ar-Rahman or whatever... that is, non-English but quite readable... the players will refer to him as "the bearded guy in the palace" anyway.

I can't tell if you meant for this name to look pronounceable but at the same time completely borked in order to make some subsidiary point about foreign names or not.

Not knowing much about Arab names, what’s wrong with it?

(My guesses would be that Hajji goes at the end and that ar-Rahman can only be used for God, but I don’t really know.)

Properly Hajji is a title for someone who has made the Hajj, for starters.

[bradrn]

I can't tell if you meant for this name to look pronounceable but at the same time completely borked in order to make some subsidiary point about foreign names or not.

Not knowing much about Arab names, what’s wrong with it?

(My guesses would be that Hajji goes at the end and that ar-Rahman can only be used for God, but I don’t really know.)

Properly Hajji is a title for someone who has made the Hajj, for starters.

Ah, thanks.

[Linguoboy]

Abdul ibn Umar Hajji ar-Rahman or whatever...

Not knowing much about Arab names, what’s wrong with it?

(My guesses would be that Hajji goes at the end and that ar-Rahman can only be used for God, but I don’t really know.)

That's correct. As an element in personal names, the latter occurs after ʿabd ("slave of").

But the most jarring element is right up front: Despite what many English-speakers seem to think, "Abdul" is not a self-standing personal name[*]. It represents a compound of ʿabd with the definite article and is always followed by one of the Attributes of God.

ibn is another common element in names and means "son of". It traditionally forms patronymics, which follow the given name. Again, since ʿabd is only used with divine attributes, under no circumstances would you have a genuine Islamic name with the elements *ʿAbdul ibn in that order (since--unlike the Christian deity--the supreme Islamic deity is son of no one).

As for Hajji, although as a title it generally occurs initially, this varies somewhat by language. (For instance, the Avar leader Uzun-Hajji was born simply "Uzun".) It can also appear as an element of one of the other personal names making up an Arab-speaker's full name. So, for instance, shuffling the elements to ʿUmar ibn Hajji ʿAbdul Rahmān[**] ("Long-living, son of the Pilgrim to Mecca Slave of the Merciful One") results in a perfectly cromulent Islamic name across many countries and centuries.

So all in all, the impression produced by "Abdul ibn Umar Hajji ar-Rahman" is that someone with no knowledge of Arabic or Islamic naming traditions simply plucked elements from a few existing Islamic names and stuck them together at random--which might well have been Mark's intention, given that he was talking about names created by popular authors writing in English for a general audience.

[*] I actually do know a Pakistani man whose given name is actually "Abdul", but that's due to a clerical error.
[**] Or "ʿAbd ar-Rahmān" or "'Abdurrahmān" or several other common variants.

[bradrn]

[many informative details]

Thank you!

Re pronunciations in The Left Hand of Darkness (and apologies that I soon begin to riff on Earthsea as well)...

It seems to me that Le Guin (a) understood that most people would pronounce Karhide with /a͜ɪ/, and (b) didn’t do anything about it; thus Karhide has /a͜ɪ/ in it for me. The same goes for Roke, and many other spellings with ⟨(VC)e⟩ in her works: in the absence of anything to prevent the reader reading these as ‘long vowels’, I presume they are intended to represent ‘long vowels’. […]

However, for some reason I read Tibe as /'ti:.bə/. She didn’t do anything about that either...

As a coda to this discussion, while searching for something unrelated I discovered that she answered these questions herself. Vowels ⟨a e i o u⟩ are as in IPA (including word-finally), ⟨ey ay⟩ are /ej ej~aj/, and:

A couple of names in Left Hand are pronounced as if in English: Tibe is not tee-beh, but rhymes with bribe. Karhide sounds like two English words, car-hide.

So it looks like between us we did get the ‘right’ pronunciation for most of the words. Maybe there’s something to her technique after all.

(But if I ever write anything in my own conworld, I don’t think I could bring myself to transcribe, say, Eŋes as ‘Engess’ or Wēchizaŋkəŋ as ‘Weregizankyng’. The very thought makes me shudder…)

[sasasha]

Re pronunciations in The Left Hand of Darkness (and apologies that I soon begin to riff on Earthsea as well)...

It seems to me that Le Guin (a) understood that most people would pronounce Karhide with /a͜ɪ/, and (b) didn’t do anything about it; thus Karhide has /a͜ɪ/ in it for me. The same goes for Roke, and many other spellings with ⟨(VC)e⟩ in her works: in the absence of anything to prevent the reader reading these as ‘long vowels’, I presume they are intended to represent ‘long vowels’. […]

However, for some reason I read Tibe as /'ti:.bə/. She didn’t do anything about that either...

As a coda to this discussion, while searching for something unrelated I discovered that she answered these questions herself. Vowels ⟨a e i o u⟩ are as in IPA (including word-finally), ⟨ey ay⟩ are /ej ej~aj/, and:

A couple of names in Left Hand are pronounced as if in English: Tibe is not tee-beh, but rhymes with bribe. Karhide sounds like two English words, car-hide.

So it looks like between us we did get the ‘right’ pronunciation for most of the words. Maybe there’s something to her technique after all.

Ah, great, I'm grateful to know this!

(But if I ever write anything in my own conworld, I don’t think I could bring myself to transcribe, say, Eŋes as ‘Engess’ or Wēchizaŋkəŋ as ‘Weregizankyng’. The very thought makes me shudder…)

Yes, I know the feeling. I have Anglicisations of some conlang terms when I write about my conworld which I use because it feels easier to me in English. They don't follow a particular rationale. For instance, I write Urngese, rather than Ruŋà u'Zusumí. Changing them that much helps prevent them falling into the uncanny valley for me.

[bradrn]

(But if I ever write anything in my own conworld, I don’t think I could bring myself to transcribe, say, Eŋes as ‘Engess’ or Wēchizaŋkəŋ as ‘Weregizankyng’. The very thought makes me shudder…)

Yes, I know the feeling. I have Anglicisations of some conlang terms when I write about my conworld which I use because it feels easier to me in English. They don't follow a particular rationale. For instance, I write Urngese, rather than Ruŋà u'Zusumí. Changing them that much helps prevent them falling into the uncanny valley for me.

Now how did you get from the one to the other in that example…?

[sasasha]

(But if I ever write anything in my own conworld, I don’t think I could bring myself to transcribe, say, Eŋes as ‘Engess’ or Wēchizaŋkəŋ as ‘Weregizankyng’. The very thought makes me shudder…)

Yes, I know the feeling. I have Anglicisations of some conlang terms when I write about my conworld which I use because it feels easier to me in English. They don't follow a particular rationale. For instance, I write Urngese, rather than Ruŋà u'Zusumí. Changing them that much helps prevent them falling into the uncanny valley for me.

Now how did you get from the one to the other in that example…?

The language in question has non-concatenating morphology. There is a form of ruŋà 'speech, to speak' in urŋas, a collective agentive nominalisation. From thence Urngese isn't too big a leap. In general I take the original and then play around with it until I find the aesthetic of, oh, I don't know, a colonial-era English ethnography book; giving the word a false history like this makes it feel 'used' to me and lends a sense of historical familiarity, so it doesn't feel like my conworld is so alien. In other words I want to write about it as familiarly as I write about places on Earth, so I want familiar parts of it to have an Anglicised name.

[bradrn]

Yes, I know the feeling. I have Anglicisations of some conlang terms when I write about my conworld which I use because it feels easier to me in English. They don't follow a particular rationale. For instance, I write Urngese, rather than Ruŋà u'Zusumí. Changing them that much helps prevent them falling into the uncanny valley for me.

Now how did you get from the one to the other in that example…?

The language in question has non-concatenating morphology. There is a form of ruŋà 'speech, to speak' in urŋas, a collective agentive nominalisation. From thence Urngese isn't too big a leap. In general I take the original and then play around with it until I find the aesthetic of, oh, I don't know, a colonial-era English ethnography book; giving the word a false history like this makes it feel 'used' to me and lends a sense of historical familiarity, so it doesn't feel like my conworld is so alien. In other words I want to write about it as familiarly as I write about places on Earth, so I want familiar parts of it to have an Anglicised name.

Ah, OK.

(Although to me Urngese feels more Italian than Anglicised: Albanese, Cantanese, Abruzzese, etc. Malayalam Varghese is even closer.)

[Ketsuban]

(Although to me Urngese feels more Italian than Anglicised: Albanese, Cantanese, Abruzzese, etc. Malayalam Varghese is even closer.)

Portuguese, Faroese, Maltese, Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Marshallese, Voynichese, legalese…

[bradrn]

(Although to me Urngese feels more Italian than Anglicised: Albanese, Cantanese, Abruzzese, etc. Malayalam Varghese is even closer.)

Portuguese, Faroese, Maltese, Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Marshallese, Voynichese, legalese…

Oh. I completely missed that it was meant to be a language name, not a personal name.

[sasasha]

That was my bad for not being particularly clear!

[Glenn]

[Catching up with the conversation; I apologize for the potentially lengthy string of replies…]

For anyone who hasn’t realised, “Music and Poetry of the Kesh” is available to listen to for free on Youtube.

Thank you for noting this! Since I have the CDs, I didn’t even think to look on Youtube.

It seems to me that Le Guin (a) understood that most people would pronounce Karhide with /a͜ɪ/, and (b) didn’t do anything about it; thus Karhide has /a͜ɪ/ in it for me. The same goes for Roke, and many other spellings with ⟨(VC)e⟩ in her works: in the absence of anything to prevent the reader reading these as ‘long vowels’, I presume they are intended to represent ‘long vowels’.

This was my approach as well.

As a coda to this discussion, while searching for something unrelated I discovered that she answered these questions herself. Vowels ⟨a e i o u⟩ are as in IPA (including word-finally), ⟨ey ay⟩ are /ej ej~aj/, and:

A couple of names in Left Hand are pronounced as if in English: Tibe is not tee-beh, but rhymes with bribe. Karhide sounds like two English words, car-hide.

Thank you for this as well! I do remember reading a previous statement by her noting that the name “Ged” is meant to be pronounced /gɛd/, not /dʒed/.

[Glenn]

But the most jarring element is right up front: Despite what many English-speakers seem to think, "Abdul" is not a self-standing personal name[*]. It represents a compound of ʿabd with the definite article and is always followed by one of the Attributes of God.

I first learned many years ago in, of all places, an edition of the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, which contained an essay providing fictional etymologies for some of the names in H.P. Lovecraft’s stories. The author of the noted that Lovecraft’s name of “Abdul Al-Hazred” for the author of the Necronomicon was ill-formed for exactly the reason you stated, and suggested “Abd Al-Azrad” as an alternative for the “true” name, which they translated as “slave of the strangler/devourer” (IIRC; I could be remembering it incorrectly). In trying to verify this online, I found that another “corrected” version some people have used is “Abd Al-Hazred,” which was translated as “slave of the ban/slave of the banned”. (I have very little knowledge of Arabic, so I have no idea if any of these translations are plausible. Incidentally, the actual external explanation for the name Abdul Al-Hazred is that Lovecraft created it as a child, probably after being exposed to The Arabian Nights, and later worked it into his fiction as an adult.)

The same essay provided “explanations” for the names of several of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones (Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, etc.); since the Necronomicon was supposedly written in Arabic and later translated into Greek, then Latin, and then English, most of these are interpreted as the garbled results of actual words in Arabic, or sometimes, e.g., Latin or Ancient Egyptian.

[Glenn]

Yes, I know the feeling. I have Anglicisations of some conlang terms when I write about my conworld which I use because it feels easier to me in English. They don't follow a particular rationale. For instance, I write Urngese, rather than Ruŋà u'Zusumí. Changing them that much helps prevent them falling into the uncanny valley for me.

In thinking about my (forever-embryonic) conworld, I similarly have had Anglicized adjective forms for some place and language names, which are not consistent and seem only to follow a vague principle of English euphony; the main examples are Kiarlon -> Kiarloni, Shyfano -> Shyfanese, Ramīya -> Ramiyan.