Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Writing Wednesday: Pronouncing Those Words on the Page

I'm in the home stretch of writing the next book in my YA mermaid series, and it's been brought to my attention that readers are unclear how to properly pronounce some of the words and names in my book.

We've all been there. Especially in paranormal or science fiction, but even in contemporary fiction. Foreign looking names that are probably not pronounced the same way they're spelled.

I know with my own kids, there are plenty of words they read and understand, but when they go to use them out loud in a sentence, they mispronounce them for one reason or another. It's a word they've only read, not heard, so they don't know. And having taken years of high school Latin, they often mispronounce English words that don't follow "normal" rules of pronunciation.

With my own series, though, I've been stuck as to how to fix this. The very first time the two main characters meet on the beach, the girl tells Shea how to pronounce her name. I thought that would be sufficient for the readers. Apparently not.

Okay, back up a sec. The boy's name is "Shea" which another character compares to baseball's Shea Stadium, so I figure that's easy enough. The longer version of his name is Gaelic and spelled Sheachnadh, which even I'm a little unclear how to pronounce.

The girl's name is Kae. Looking at it, it's similar to Shea and maybe it makes sense to say "Kay"... but in the first book she explains.


When the girl said his name, it tingled in his ears like music touching him all the way to his toes. Goosebumps prickled up his arms.
He cleared his throat. “So what’s your name?”
“My name’s Kae.” She smiled, her lips parting to show perfect pearly white teeth. “Kaa – ee,” she enunciated again. She stood and stretched her arms toward the sky. She was easily the same height as he was. “You must pronounce all the sounds.”
“Kaa – ee,” he repeated in the same exaggerated fashion and shook his head. “I haven’t seen you on the beach before.” 
“You’re the new one.” Kae tucked her wet hair behind her ears. “My family is here every summer.”
 See? I thought that made sense. But my kids tell me no. So I came up with an idea - adding an umlat to the "e" to make sure it gets pronounced as a separate vowel.

But how to do that on the computer?

Turns out it's not that hard in Word. Type Control Shift Colon, release and then type the letter you want the umlat over. Except of course it doesn't seem to want to work for me in Blogger, there must be a different key combo in this program.

Now I need to decide if I want to go in and fix the first two books to reflect the revised spelling. Or if that will still be just as confusing. People seem to be able to pronounce Zoe and Chloe properly without the use of an umlat - I didn't realize my mermaid's name would be so difficult.

Have you come across this in your own writing? Where a word is perfectly easy to say in your own head but then you find other's having difficulty? What have you done to fix the problem?

Happy Writing - and Reading - to you all!



15 comments:

  1. I've had the same problem with accents on blogger. Now I'm in the habit of writing the entire post on Word, and then copy and pasting it to my blog. You can still insert images where ever you need them. It seems to me that you explained the pronunciation well enough.

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    1. Thanks for the tip, Sandra. I may try that.

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    2. I cut & paste too--blogger doesn't have all the word processing gizmos (I'm not sure it's meant to). As to pronunciation, for me as a reader I'm uncomfortable if I don't know how to pronounce a name & would appreciate either textual explanation or even a note at beginning or end of the book "On Pronunciation." I often use names from other languages for my characters (for the meaning) but I try to choose ones whose pronunciation is obvious.

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  2. While I don't have that issue in my writing, I do in reading. I can't tell you how long it took for me to realize that Hermione was not pronounced Her-mee-own. :)

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    1. I think I had to look up the pronunciation for her name, as I was reading the books out loud to my kids back then. Can't have mom sounding like she doesn't know something important...

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    2. Hahaha I still pronounce it like that, after years of mispronouncing it in my head!

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  3. My daughter thought it was pronounced _Hermee ONE.

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    1. Makes sense :-) Readers don't have those problems any more with Harry Potter, since the movies are out now.

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  4. I agree that it can be a problem in reading. Actually I though the explanation given by Kae in the segment you posted made perfect sense and was a good way to explain it. Currently I have a main secondary character whose name I thought was perfectly clear, but when my crit group read it aloud, I discovered it wasn't clear at all. Since my story is medieval, I may just have to change his name :(

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    1. I think that depends, especially with medieval and Gaelic names. Whether to give in to modern readers and change it, or put in a glossary, or have another character pronounce it wrong and be corrected... the easiest route is to change it in the first place, which I didn't do but maybe wish I had...

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  5. I thought the way you explained it was clear. I'm awful about knowing what umlats and other punctuation stand for (see, I can't even come up with the correct names. I call the umlat the little double dots and the other punctuation: slashes over a letter. I'm bad). I either pronounce things my own way (often wrong) or just skip the name when I read. I know. Lazy or strange, right? :)

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    1. Not lazy or strange in my book. Did you ever read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? I read the whole series and couldn't tell you how to pronounce a single one of those names. I'd look at it and say "okay" and just kept track of them by spelling, not even making an attempt out loud.

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    2. Glad to know I'm not the only one! Yes, I read GWTDT, but we had gone to Sweden and I have the Rosetta Stone for Swedish so didn't have much of a problem with it. :) It was fun to recognize places in the book. :) But, I do know what you mean. That's exactly what I do for a good deal of names/places/etc.

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  6. Great post. The only issue I had was also my YA novel, I wanted to give the Nephilim character a Biblical name with an ancient sound (and a meaning that fit). I chose Dothan and then had the main character tell her friend in conversation how to say it (DOE-than).

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