Anyone read these yet?

[bellatrys]

Dragonspell by Donita Paul, published by WaterBrook PressSaw the set in Barnes & Nobles the other day but was on my way out & didn't have time to skim them. This is the Random House offshoot that published that "coming Apocalypse/War with Islam" book that I posted about a few weeks ago, btw. Just curious if anyone's yet had a chance to investigate

Comments

Will now attempt death-defying feat of pronunciation

[deiseach]

Ladeeez and gennlmen! Behold, as - without the aid of a net! - approximation of pronunciation is attempted!

Pray silence please!

"Fionn" can be and has been anglicised as 'Finn', so that part wasn't too bad - pronounced roughly (very roughly) 'fee-yuhn'.

"Macha", on the other hand - nowhere near 'mokka', something like 'mack-kah' with the first bit nearer a cross between 'mack' and 'mock' - yes, confused yet? So we've got something that very nearly sounds like 'fee-yuhn maock-kah' with the 'kah' bit kind of gently gurgled.

Anyway, the most famous Fionn is Fionn Mac Cumhal/Finn McCool so the 'finmokka' bit *really* threw me. And I don't know if Julian Sands was attempting to approximate an Irish accent, but if he was, it didn't work. That was half the trouble with the second film; I spent more time fretting over what the *hell* his name was or was supposed to be or what nationality he was supposed to be, rather than following the plot.

So it should have been more like Fionn Mac Macha or Fionn Uí Macha, but they really should have dropped all attempts to be 'accurate' and just called him Finn McCool or Paddy Murphy or Mick O'Flynn and then everyone would have been happy.

Re: Will now attempt death-defying feat of pronunciation

[evilstorm]

*giggling* I will never understand how Gaelic is s'posed to be pronounced.

Yeah, I. I feel your pain. Hollywood keeps trying to give people authentic Chinese names and auuuggghhh.

If I were a masochist

[bellatrys]

and not just a quondam cutter, I would suggest compiling a "Definitive Fandom Guide to Irish & Chinese Pronunciation, The Way They Actually Sound Relative To BBC-English Pronunciation, Not According To Some Arcane Arbitrary System That Makes No Sense To Anybody And Has No Relation To Any Known Latin Orthography, Not Even French" - it would be absolute ruddy hell to try to pin down (even if we did "and this is how, if you have a northern/southern/eastern/western/wherever accent"), we'd NEVER hear the end of it (I base this on witnessed international attempts to figure out pronunciation on Usenet back in the '90s which generally turned into regional dogfights and accusations of who sounded stoopider) from people complaining that we'd got it all wrong - and the best way of course would be to do it with linked soundfiles but who could afford to host it? let alone who would want to record it and be thus immortalized in hubris...

Re: If I were a masochist

[evilstorm]

...I say we need that for Irish. Pinyin actually works pretty well, really. Maybe it's cos I'm used to it, though, in which case I'd need gweilo input before I could do anything.

Free/sponsored hosting? How much bandwidth would you need?

...wait is this s'posed to be a thought experiment or for reals. I do it for real, sure, but only after my finals.

Well, of course you would! [g]

[bellatrys]

Pinyin actually works pretty well, really. Maybe it's cos I'm used to it,

Yup. If you heard me trying to read names in Pinyin, you'd laugh at me, or else go "Huh? What was that supposed to be?" I actually have [very, very slightly] more confidence in my ability to read out Vietnamese and have it sound sort of like what it should, because even tho' I can't keep the diacritical straight, knowing that it's French-based means that I have something of a baseline for how it's skewing from English (Spanish, Italian) pronunciations of Latin letters. As for Irish Gaelic...let's just say that listening to Enya and reading along the liner notes was very enlightening - "Good lord, *that's* how you pronounce X? Where did all the consonants go? Elope with their French counterparts after 1798, or what?"

Actually, I could probably get the soundfiles compressed down small enough to host it on OL, now that I think about it, with my various freeware sound editing programs like Audacity. (Free hosts would never put up with the bandwidth usage if it got TORN'd, or just regularly popular, and we'd be at a risk of getting shut down anyway by them because OMG MP3s and better safe than C&D'd.)

...wait is this s'posed to be a thought experiment or for reals. I do it for real, sure, but only after my finals.

It's just something to mull around, at this stage. Logistically we might actually be able to do it, altho' we'd have to be careful or we might end up never speaking to each other again... We'd have to do something like 1) come up with a basic list of the most popular names/words [mis] used in fantasy/sf/adventure, in each language, and then 2) have you native speakers record and email them to me, and then I'd have to 3) transcribe them into Latin alphabet, as best I heard them, and then 4) we'd have to test them by having other people read them out loud and record them and you all see if it was passable.

Not having internet at home, makes this even more of a logistical nightmare to me, but just the temerity of it is one of those "slap me" sort of things - the idea of all the people going "Why bother doing this? Just learn all different orthographies! Buy lots of tapes! Better yet, go take courses in Mandarin/Irish/Welsh/Scots Gaelic!" on top of all the people going "That's not right, that's only how they say it in the far corner down by Whereveritis, you're teaching people a stupid [Bronx-equivalent/Youpie-equivalent] accent! beyond all the people going "your links are broke/I can't get your soundfiles to play on my computer, help!"

No. We should definitely not be thinking at all seriously about this...

Heh. You mentioned regional dogfights?

[deiseach]

Enya is from Donegal, so she has Ulster Irish which is (a) very influenced by Scots Gaelic (b) rather softer, to my ear, than Munster Irish. There's a lot of elison and slurring in both Ulster and Connacht Irish by comparison with Munster Irish - sometimes I think we're still stuck in the 14th Century down here in the south ;-)

e.g. 'lamh' which is 'hand' - in Ulster, it comes across as something like 'lay-ooh' but I'd say it as 'law-vuh'. So, yeah, sound-files. Good luck! With the provisio, of course, that I'm not going to go over the airwaves for people to laugh at my voice and if you do dig something up I'll be the one going "Well, yes, that's Munster Irish, but of course, he's a Kerryman, while we in Waterford say it like this." And Cork is slightly different, and Clare, and Limerick, and Tipperary...

For an idea of Connacht Irish, go to http://www.rte.ie/rnag/index.html and just try listening live or clicking on a playback of a programme (try http://www.rte.ie/rnag/sruthnamaoile.html which is Sruth na Maoile and is a co-production with BBC Scotland; the man speaks Connacht Irish, the woman speaks Scots Gaelic, and it's interesting how close and how different at the same time the two are).

Can't make much of a go of Pinyin, I'm afraid; I have better luck with Giles-Wade, which I understand to be a horribly inaccurate imperialist running dog lackey travesty of the tongue :-)

But since I have no sense of music, I'm hopeless with things like tonal languages - I'd be the one calling someone's mother a female dog when I meant to say old lady.

Some links, more or less useful

[deiseach]

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=53063

This one has small soundfile snippets - you have to pay to get all the phrases, boo! hiss! but there is a list on the right hand side of the page which at least gives a flavour (and yes, I'm going to say now, the Munster speaker sounds to these ears more like a Dub speaking than a true blue Munster man, but then...)

http://www.irish-sayings.com/irish-gaelic-words.php?feature=7

And for pure time-wasting goodness, this one:

http://www.ucc.ie/celt/index.html

Doesn't do pronunciations. Does do putting source texts - in a choice of Irish, English, Latin, Hiberno-Norman French, or for the wimps among us, translated texts - up there on screen so you too can waste half the day reading the Táin :-)

What, you mean 'Jimmy Lee' isn't authentic?

[deiseach]

I am ever so surprised to hear that. What with them finally getting around to casting Asian actors as Asians, I had thought they were ever so historically accurate.

True, they still have Koreans playing Chinese, Chinese playing Japanese, Japanese playing Thai, and anyone medium-tan playing everything from Arab to Mexican, but at least they're making the effort, hm?

(What I really want to see is the Chinese equivalent where the local star plays, oh, King Arthur or Robin Hood or whomever, quite irregardless of the character being North-Western European and the actor not. Someone must have done it, surely?)

Re: What, you mean 'Jimmy Lee' isn't authentic?

[evilstorm]

Actually. Considering the Western Cultural Invasion, you prolly could find a lot of Jimmy Lees running around. Mom worked with a Jimmy in Taiwan, iirc. I am told that in intermediate-level Chinese classes, "globalization" is taught to mean something equivalent to "bad Western influences corrupting good Chinese traditions". Yeah. XD Learning the Chinese language isn't just picking up a language, it also involves ingesting the helluva lot of cultural indoctrination and propaganda.

(You know, I don't know. Yes, someone must've done it, but I've never heard of any flick like that. Hmmmmm.)