Guild Wars 2

Seriously, this drives me insane.

You give the Sylvari Gaelic names… for “flavor” I guess, but then pronounce all of them horribly. I’m sad it didn’t matter to the writers at all, to appropriate the culture of those names and then not bother to explain to the voice actors how to actually SAY them.

Caithe should be pronounced “Kaih”

Faolain should be “FEE-lan”

I could go on listing names but it just goes on and on. Why bother to appropriate Celtic names and then ignore the way they’re pronounced?

Because this is how the writers chose to have those names pronounced, most likely in an effort to be approached by a wider audience or differentiate themselves from the language they borrowed from. I don’t see the issue.

Feycat.4370:

I could go on listing names but it just goes on and on. Why bother to appropriate Celtic names and then ignore the way they’re pronounced?

Well you can’t blame Caithe not pronouncing her name in a proper Gaelic way, she never heard of Ireland.

Same reason they give Sylvari Gaelic names and posh English accents I suppose.

Also, just to be fair, some Irish accents are really hard to reproduce and understand. My godparents are from Derry and have really thick accents. I can still only understand about 80% of what they say; I just have to infer the rest from context.

Well strictly speaking, the Sylvari have Gaelic and Brythonic names (and mine an Old English one :P). I don’t mind the mispronunciations of the names, they may be inspired by the sidhe or other faerie-types in Celtic Mythology, but they are Sylvari. Also, as with all languages, there are pronunciations (and phrasal) differences in the Gaeilge you’d find up in Donegal than down around Kerry, Cork, Connemara, etc. (I assume there are differences with Welsh in Wales as well, have never lived there).

And not to nit pick, but Faolain can be pronounced a number of ways! It can also be pronounced ‘Fwee-lin’ or ‘Feh-lin’ (and, if it had the sineadh fada diacritic over the a in Faolan, it’d be Fwee-lawn or Feh-lawn). The ‘aoi’ in Gaeilge is the ‘ee’ sound in English, and when preceeded by a consonant at the start of a word there is usually a ‘w’ sound. For instance, the name Caoimhe is pronounced ‘Kwee-va’ (but again, mh is almost always a ‘v’ round down Munster).

tl;dr Pronunciation varies with rl dialect, so ‘mispronunciations’ are alright. They are Sylvari.

Oh they did the same thing in Final Fantasy XII if I remember right. It’s to give the characters a theme but make their culture still distinct. They may have Gaelic names but they’re not Gaelic. Gaelic’s don’t exist in Tyria. The same way French doesn’t exist in whatever that world was called. So they pronounced Marquis “wrong” the entire game. Or well, right. Seeing as that was the right way to pronounce it on their world.

It’s quite normal. Take for eample the Greek name Helena. How do you pronounce it? Most likely the way you see it. The fact that the Greek letter H is actually prounced as i(independent) probably doesn’t bother you. I can give you more examples about names “butchered” by a different language/culture that nobody even notices(like, the character from Harry Potter – Viktor Krum…his name sounds wrong on so many levels to a person with slavic origin…and the author is actually known for extensive research…) and it just becomes custom. A lot of Germanic names suffer that same fate when they meet English(Schwimmer, DeWitt). It’s called “adapting”. Sylvari obviously speak English and thus adapt the names to fit with their own language.

TWMagimay.9057:

It’s quite normal. Take for eample the Greek name Helena. How do you pronounce it? Most likely the way you see it. The fact that the Greek letter H is actually prounced as i(independent) probably doesn’t bother you. I can give you more examples about names “butchered” by a different language/culture that nobody even notices(like, the character from Harry Potter – Viktor Krum…his name sounds wrong on so many levels to a person with slavic origin…and the author is actually known for extensive research…) and it just becomes custom. A lot of Germanic names suffer that same fate when they meet English(Schwimmer, DeWitt). It’s called “adapting”. Sylvari obviously speak English and thus adapt the names to fit with their own language.

New Krytan* Technically, all races on Tyria speak and write in New Krytan if I remember correctly.