Young Writers Society

OK, I already asked this on another subsection but I'm not sure that was the right one since it's been days and I got no reply. Now that I'm considering actually publishing stories, I'm wondering what I should do with all the Choskchsskiirt and other fictional languages. They might alienate people since they're meant to be realistic fictional languages and I didn't even make them with other people reading them in mind. My short story here that had some Choskchsskiirt words and one from Leuaniea in it got received positively though so maybe it's fine.

Usually what authors do in books is they have something like this:

"Please close the door behind you," he said in Elvish.

Unfortunately, not as cool as actually hearing Elvish (or something else) in a movie while being able to read the subtitles in your native language, but I've mostly seen people do that. I've also seen a foreign word said in the book with a translation in the footnotes or in the index, but it's never more than just a word or two.

Maybe try that? Kinda makes it hard to use the language you've created, but I'm not sure how else you can use the language and ensure your audience will understand. xD

It's pretty much just limited to names, but I'm worried the names will alienate people...

I don't think so. I think it'll be fine but perhaps you can include a pronunciation in their author's note or something?

How should I give the pronunciation? IPA, in terms of sounds in other languages... ? "Qrainespfuhr" isn't pronounced like English at all, for one instance.

If I'm reading that right, the Q makes a K sound? So like... Krain-es-fur?

Just try as best as you can

With a lot of books I read that had certain difficult pronunciations or a certain dialect that isn't English or something that I (read: the reader) won't understand will put a glossary of sorts in the back of the book. I know The Inheritance Cycle had it and I believe The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel had it as well.

Honestly, if your names are too hard to pronounce in English at all, you should think about altering them for it to be a little easier to pronounce. If it's hard for you, as the author, to pronounce your names, then it'll be much more difficult for the reader to pronounce it.

Iggy wrote:If I'm reading that right, the Q makes a K sound? So like... Krain-es-fur?

Just try as best as you can

The Q is a sound actually made in the throat, even further back than the sound romanized as q in Arabic. The ai is line the i in "mine". The "e" is a schwa sound like the a in "about" the "s" is a hard and sharp s sound, the pf is like German pf, the "u" is like the oo in book, and the hr is another throat sound that sounds a bit like an h and r mixed. IPA is [ˈʡʀaɪ˥.nəsˌp͡fʊʜ˥]. It's a beast of a word in terms of not being similar to English and having rare sounds. If you pronounce it like crane-ez-fur you will not be understood by any Choskcher. I didn't give it the spelling it has just so it'd look weird.

Another question for you:

How important is it that these words are pronounced correctly?

If you're going to use this— and nobody here is going to stop you, that's an editor's job, and yes your work just might get rejected on the basis of made up language alone, but that's a tangent— how dead set are you on these words being pronounced correctly?

Because if you don't care how the words end up pronounced, this is a totally moot point. Your words will be pronounced however readers end up pronouncing them, and you get the satisfaction of using your made up languages.

If you do care how the words end up pronounced, then that's where the debate comes in, for both making it enjoyable for you and legible to most of the population. If you end up making things unintuitive, then you'll be dealing with the frustration of knowing that, out there, most readers of your stories won't get it right even with a pronunciation guide because it's too much effort to learn a new set of sounds for a fictional work (barring exceptions such as Klingon or Elvish).

So. It all boils down to whether or not you care about the eventual pronunciation of your languages.

If you don't care, then do whatever it is that's fun.

If you do care, well, there's a whole lot of work ahead to make it that people will understand, either in the form of a glossary or in the form of remaking the languages.

This probably sounds mean, but if I pick up a published book and browse through it and it looks like the author has basically smashed his fist in the keyboard to come up with the names, I put it down and stop reading it. In fact, the name "Choskchsskiirt" would probably put me off because it almost looks like "choke a skirt" to me. Which is a bit weird. (Qrainespfuhr is a little bit better because it looks like the combination of sulfur and rain, which might make a good villain name...)

Anyway! Just some of my thoughts.

Wunderbar wrote:The Q is a sound actually made in the throat, even further back than the sound romanized as q in Arabic. The ai is line the i in "mine". The "e" is a schwa sound like the a in "about" the "s" is a hard and sharp s sound, the pf is like German pf, the "u" is like the oo in book, and the hr is another throat sound that sounds a bit like an h and r mixed. IPA is [ˈʡʀaɪ˥.nəsˌp͡fʊʜ˥].

So, you're taking two arbitrarily-chosen languages which have little to no plausible/previous historical cultural crossover and mashing them together into something that by your own admission is:

Wunderbar wrote:[...] a beast of a word in terms of not being similar to English and having rare sounds.

I am a language major, having formally studied four languages if you count my native tongue, and generally have a good gist of being able to pronounce words I have not seen often in said languages when other people get their eyes or tongues tied in a knot trying to read them. And I am struggling to pronounce your names. (And yes, Arabic is one of those languages, and I am intimately familiar with the "qof"/ق sound which you have described.)

If you will notice, in Tolkien's books and some of the other aforementioned literature in Jhinx's post, though the names sound or look foreign to us, they are still generally easy on the eyes after a relatively short period--about a quick moment--to decipher what Romanized characters make up that name. And even if the reader doesn't pronounce it quite right, generally they will come close.

These names are not that.

These are stumbling blocks. If not outright walls.

As Snoink said, these are names that will get your readers putting down the book because what average reader is going to want to torture their eyes with that for three-hundred-or-so pages?

Wunderbar wrote:If you pronounce it like crane-ez-fur you will not be understood by any Choskcher.

Well, there's at least one good thing about this discussion--you'll know what non-Choskcher characters will totally butcher your MC's name!

P.s.--Just to be clear, my four languages stretch the gammut of pronunciation types: Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, and English.

Another thing to consider is that you want your readers to relate to your character, or at least connect on some level, and if the names make the reader think about a character as "that dude with unpronuncable name who started as a merchant's son" or whatever, that might not quite achieve closeness.

That said, though, readers also tend to either nickname characters or skim the unpronuncable name and read it later on as whatever they thought they saw the first time. I had a friend who "made up" names for Harry Potter characters when we were young, because most of them and most sounds in them don't exist as such in the language that's our native. The only reason why I didn't do that is because the HP books came with the pronunciation glossary at the end, and I'm one of those people who actually reads those.

By the way, I'm fairly sure that such glossaries are the choice of the editor/translator/agent [for international matters] or some such more than the author themselves, since I haven't seen it in any other eddition of HP.

Gladius wrote:

Wunderbar wrote:The Q is a sound actually made in the throat, even further back than the sound romanized as q in Arabic. The ai is line the i in "mine". The "e" is a schwa sound like the a in "about" the "s" is a hard and sharp s sound, the pf is like German pf, the "u" is like the oo in book, and the hr is another throat sound that sounds a bit like an h and r mixed. IPA is [ˈʡʀaɪ˥.nəsˌp͡fʊʜ˥].

So, you're taking two arbitrarily-chosen languages which have little to no plausible/previous historical cultural crossover and mashing them together into something that by your own admission is:

Wunderbar wrote:[...] a beast of a word in terms of not being similar to English and having rare sounds.

I am a language major, having formally studied four languages if you count my native tongue, and generally have a good gist of being able to pronounce words I have not seen often in said languages when other people get their eyes or tongues tied in a knot trying to read them. And I am struggling to pronounce your names. (And yes, Arabic is one of those languages, and I am intimately familiar with the "qof"/ق sound which you have described.)

If you will notice, in Tolkien's books and some of the other aforementioned literature in Jhinx's post, though the names sound or look foreign to us, they are still generally easy on the eyes after a relatively short period--about a quick moment--to decipher what Romanized characters make up that name. And even if the reader doesn't pronounce it quite right, generally they will come close.

These names are not that.

These are stumbling blocks. If not outright walls.

As Snoink said, these are names that will get your readers putting down the book because what average reader is going to want to torture their eyes with that for three-hundred-or-so pages?

Wunderbar wrote:If you pronounce it like crane-ez-fur you will not be understood by any Choskcher.

Well, there's at least one good thing about this discussion--you'll know what non-Choskcher characters will totally butcher your MC's name!

P.s.--Just to be clear, my four languages stretch the gammut of pronunciation types: Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, and English.

This is a language not from Earth. It's not supposed to look like any specific Earth language, and it would be surprising if it looked exactly like German or English or whatever people want from it. And as far as Earth languages go, you'd be surprised at what's similar to what. A lot of Northeast Caucasian languages have a high degree of similaritiy to both German and Arabic (especially Chechen).

The sound I described is not the qof sound. This is the sound I described: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiglottal_stop I said it's further back than qof, and I mean it. There is no qof in this language, so I use q for that sound to not have to use as many diacritics.

You don't speak all the kinds of languages. Come back when you can pronounce all the things in Nuxálk or !Xoo (for two extreme examples).

However, if you're annoyed by these names, I'll just make Anglicized versions of them that don't torture readers as much. Qrainespfuhr is also a forest, not a person. The main character in the thing I'm writing now is Jörchde (I haven't made a family name or other names for her yet) which is less of a shibboleth kind of thing but still unlikely to be pronounced right by readers since they'll think it's French or something.