T w e n t y S i d e d
From The Archives:
Playstation 3
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
DM of the Rings
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Quakecon 2012 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
I recently read a David Weber book that was egregious about this. There was a Yeraghor, and a Yurakhas, and both of them were second-in-command of their diametrically opposed factions. So you’d read “Y——- has done this thing” and not know whether that was supposed to be a good thing or a bad one.
Also, just letter-salad names. Serious characters had names longer than my joke name of Seterevevenek.
I remember playing a D&D campaign set in a certain city full of Drow, relatively famous in the Forgotten Realms setting. But no one remembered (or really cared) how to spell or pronounce Menzoberananon. We couldn’t remember how Meranzabanon was actually said, so eventually started just riffing on names like Me-nasa-be-gone or Mensa-be-anon.
As a non-Chinese-speaking player I am similarly confused by Genshin Impact. We have characters called Xinyan, Xianyun, Xiangling, Xinqiu, Xiao and now Xilonen as well @_@
The names are probably much easier to distinguish if they are written using the original characters. They’re probably also pronounced differently since there’s tones involved.
German has some of that – I’ve recently read a disquisition on the meaning of the lyrics in Rammstein’s “Du Hast”, which relies on wordplay between “Du hast” (you have) and “Du hasst” (you hate).
English has a lot of that – there are three “to-s” after all, not two, and there’s the other one too.
I have to admit, the first time I read Lord of the Rings, I didn’t know Sauron and Saruman were different people. Even after that was made clear, I didn’t understand who either of them were.
I just finished an audiobook of The Wheel of Time. There are “Damani” – inhabitants of Arad Doman and “Damani” – leashed channelers from Sean Chan.
Unsurprisingly you aren’t the first one to run into that issue with the audiobooks – I don’t think they’re easily confused in the text, since one is treated as a proper noun and the other always an italicized translation: e.g. “a Domani woman” vs. “a Seanchan damane” and the context is very different.
(And I’m surprised the audiobook narrators didn’t just choose to pronounce one differently… then again the same narrators couldn’t agree on the pronunciation of a fairly significant character’s name in Stormlight Archives – they’re good narrators, but maybe not always the best on the nuances of pronunciation)
Also, on the “S” names thing Wheel of Time is infamous for having a lot of S-named Aes Sedai: hope you don’t get Sheriam Sedai, confused with Shemerin, Saerin, Seaine, or Sarene. Or Selene, for that matter, but she’s not an Aes Sedai.
A similar audiobook-induced issue: the Lightbringer series has an important character call “the White” and magic users gone rogue are called “wights”.
I kinda wish Sanderson would include a pronunciation guide to names (like Tolkien did, to swing back around on topic). Sure, “Teft” is pretty self-explanatory, but I only learned “Jasnah” is intended to be pronounced “Yass-nah” instead of “Jazz-nah” from randomly hearing him say it in a video, and I still don’t know if that’s meant to apply universally to all J names in The Stormlight Achive (like “Jezrien”). I do like how he simulated linguistic change over time with the Heralds’ names, being recognizably similar in the present but different from their names in their own time period thousands of years earlier, and different between cultures/languages as well.
Edit: Just remembered Sanderson has something like the Domani/Damane thing in Elantris, where characters will exclaim “Merciful Domi…”, which might be taken to refer to the Shard Dominion…but Domi is actually the name of the Aon (symbol) referring to Devotion (the other Shard on the planet) in the local language.
His opinion seems to be that you can pronounce it how you like.
He even admits that Vin, from Mistborn, *should* be pronounce with a W sound, but definitely pronounces it with a V.
In the 1978 Lord of the Rings film, they actually said “Aruman” a few times because they wanted to avoid people confusing the names.
Then, funnily enough, due to a recording error, they left several instances of “Saruman” to be alongside “Aruman” thus making it even more confusing to viewers, as the character’s name alternated between “Saruman” and “Aruman”, sometimes within a second of each other.
Only a wizard can have an occasionally-silent S in their name.
only legitimate use of the html blink tag (other than Schrödinger’s cat is ( blink) not (/blink) dead) the forum eats the correct brackets, so… Yeah, sorry
One time, my friends confused Baklava and Balaclava, when I announced it was November 17th, National Baklava Day.