AKA: those startling names you find in scifi and fantasy ficition that make you scratch your head and then continue to be read as 'that name' every time you come across it.
It's all a bit of a trope/cliche when it comes to this form of fiction these days but it seems obligatory that at least one character/place/thing in scifi/fantasy fiction is required to be adorned with a name that is either impossible to pronounce or is just so long that saying it would only give you a headache. Whether or not you love or hate this feature of the genre however is not what this thread is about . . . Currently I have a kinda running game with a friend to try and find as many as those atrosciously horridly difficult names as possible and learn how to pronounce them! So let this thread be a culmination of as many strangely spelt, hard to pronounce, obscenely long names as possible. :D Because as bad as they may be, they are fun.
At the moment, my favourite is from Brent Weeks 'Night Angel' series which is Dehvirahaman ko Bruhmaeziwakazari. Every other name in the series is easily pronounced and relatively normal -- also exceedingly lame if you take note of the terrible word puns used -- and then for no real apparent reason the character of Blint (nice and easy) informs the main character his name is now Dehvirahaman ko Bruhmaeziwakazari. Apparently even Weeks got sick of it since he stopped refering to Blint as such after a few chapters.
From the same series there is also a place known as X!zassu -- what the phonetic function of the exclamation mark is I have yet to fathom.
Any other people know of?
Wanderer Ward
12 years ago
Wanderer Ward
Dreamscape Artist
That name is absolutely ridiculous! I can't think of any off the top of my head (if they're stored in my head, they're clearly not obscure enough anyway :P ), but exclamation marks in words generally indicate alveolar clicks of some kind (which means the tip of your tongue touches the alveolar ridge - that bit behind your top teeth). Sorry for the bad explanation! ~:| But anyway, the author's not necessarily conforming to the International Phonetic Alphabet, so it could mean anything :P
Wanderer Guilden
12 years ago
Wanderer Guilden
Mage
Woah. Just... woah. o_O
Like Kaede, I can't think of any off the top of my head, but whenever there's something named so complexly and dificultish (yes, I know, they're not words... shhhh :P ) I just start replacing them with mental pictures or make a random sound in my head that I associate with the word, like "mph" :P
Occasionally there's an entire sentence that ends up sounding like this in my head:
"[Mental picture of a red-head female] stood looking over mph as whats-his-name petted blargh, his horse."
:P
