If it hadn’t been for voice chat, I never would have known there were so many different ways to pronounce words like:
- shaman
- pyrite
- Moria
- melee (people who pronounce it ‘mealey’ make me twitch though)
- the name of just about any NPC
I guess that in games like SWTOR that are fully voiced I’ll just have to yell at the NPCs, “No, you’re saying it wrong!!”
Welcome to Spinksville! 
Being a boring American-English speaker where the only accent I have is in how I pronounce Chicago, I love hearing my EU guildmates talk. Accents and slightly different pronounciations are so refreshing.
There are different ways of saying Chicago? 😀
I thought I would chime in while I too am a member of the US-born, EU-bred WoW-playing fiends… I can only concur with Ravious. Listening to Cockney accents whilst beating the stuffing outta raid bosses INCREASES my enjoyment of the game 1000fold 😀
We had a young lady from Scotland though, I just couldn’t understand a word she said. We speak the same language?
And the amount of different ways of pronounce your own characters name.
Most of them don’t sound as amazing as you intended your characters name to be. 🙂
One of my favorite Vent words is “buffet”.
Specifically:
“Crap, Al’ar’s flame buffet just killed me!”
Note to Vent users: Al’ar isn’t serving an all you can eat BBQ.
I blame McDonalds for this, the filet-o-fish confused an entire generation.
Heehee.
This whole post is win, but “buffet” pronounced as “boofay” (when it’s about being air-smacked) is pretty funny.
I think my favorite it how a friend of mine always pronounces the EQ2 “Thundering Steppes” zone as “Thundering Steeps.” Or friends who, back when we played SWG, always pronounced “scythe” as “sky-th.”
There are multiple ways to pronounce pyrite? Who knew?
And @Salvaenus — I grew up in Chicago and while there’s only 1 “official” pronunciation, yeah… you hear it said many different ways over time. One of the suburbs actually has a law on how to pronounce its name. “Joliet” is “joe-lee-eht” and *not* “jolly-et.” Somehow I don’t think that law’s ever actually been enforced, but it’s on the books. . . .
I use Shaaa-Mun. Others say Shay-man.
Pie right? Is there another way to say it?
I didnt realize there was any other way to pronounce Moria either.
Also, yes it should be May-Lay. Sounds better to me at least.
I don’t say it, but I can imagine “pire-ite”
I’m pretty sure shay-man is the proper way, but I say shaa-man because I dislike and avoid the “ay” sound, whatever it is called.
I have heard pie-rite and pie-rie-tee
I think with shaman, it’s complicated here because shar-marn is the german pronunciation.
I was surprised how differently people pronounce the name “Megan”.
Annunimas, Evendim and even Forochel are difficult, too. And in Guild Wars people were ran to Droknar’s Forge over Camp Raknor, Rankor, Ragnar, Roknar, … 😉
I’ll only speak properly if you swear fealty to me 😉
Meridian 59 had these issues before voice chat. Players who meet me offline often ask me how to pronounce different names in the game. The trickiest one was the town name of “Barloque”, which the developers I worked with pronounced as “bar-LOAK” but others pronounced it “bar-lo-KAY”.
I blame the original young designers for the naming mess in M59. 🙂
Don’t forget Hearth. It’s Heart, not Earth.
I once had a priest named Kalya. 90% of the people in my guild called me Kayla. Eventually it became an in-joke and they’d do it on purpose just to make me angry. One of the reasons I left that guild.
I think it’s funny when not even the developers can agree how to pronounce their own words. At Blizzcon, I don’t think any two people pronounced “draenei” the same way. I abhor the “drain-eye” pronunciation, and stick with the one the narrator uses when you first create one.
And with nice timing wow.com has a neat article about the VIP charity dinner at Blizzcon which involves someone making an absolute HASH of saying c’thun.
How can people not know how to say C’thun. It’s like C’thuhlu. I mean, seriously. What do they teach them at school these days?!
KAH-THOO-LOO
Easy. I’m off to sacrifice something to a Great Old One. Can’t hurt.
Then I’m going to practice pronouncing R’lyeh.
Don’t get me started on Polish last names. So many letters, so few actually sounded out. . . .
Don’t forget Mana
Everyone sees the word in writing, but they never pronounce it correctly.
I never did vent, since I played FFXI on PS2 mostly. That game had tongue twisters, Any mithra NPC had names like Meh Chotsileko or something, and I don’t think anyone agreed on how to pronounce they apostrophe names like Vana’Diel, Kamn’Laut or ix’Aern.
TOR will probably follow The KOTOR trend and make most of the characters speak with upper-class british accents except for the rough and tumble ones like smugglers and bounty hunters.
In my mind the most alarming thing can be the variance between your mental picture of someone and their actual voice.
Que jokes about the cute pigtailed Gnome having a deep baritone and manly regional accent ‘Ey up lad’
Or worse the guild main tank sounding like a choirboy…still just as competent but somehow not as reassuring as …say Ciderhelm (and thats a whole nother thread right there)
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I have yet to hear anyone add an “r” into the Azerothian equivalent of “Washington”. That makes me happy. (I can understand different vowel pronunciations since there aren’t any real rules to them, and even dropping letters since we’ve coopted several French words, but *adding* letters that *aren’t there* always hits my nerve centers like fingernails on a chalkboard. It’s *not* “Warshington”, people.)
Oh yeah, and how we discovered at this year’s Blizzcon that Uldum is apparently meant to be pronounced as Uldoom, when I and everyone else I knew had been pronouncing it Ul-dumb.
Next we’re going to find out that we should have been pronouncing Ulduman as Ul-DOOM-on this whole time, and nobody ever told us!
See, that’s another of those “vowels have stupid rules” words. The “u” used without any accompanying vowels should be pronounced the same way in both places. We just don’t expect the two to have different sounds in that usage.
At some point, I really have to wonder how much of it is just bad writing that is ignorant of common usage (“let’s do a fantasy name by jamming on the keyboard”), and how much of is it just the stupidity of common usage. *shrug*