Earlier this year I wrote a post about some of my thoughts on coming up with suitable character names. Now I have something else to say on this subject, and it’s really more of a pet peeve: It’s when authors of science and fiction and fantasy novels invent names for places and characters that I, as a reader, am not sure how to pronounce correctly. The English language is filled with inconsistent rules for spelling and pronunciation, and new words can be tricky. Unusual and exotic made-up names are fun and can be a useful part of the world-building, I’m sure. But in my opinion, if you’re going to invent a new name, it’s best to find a string of letters whose pronunciation is not ambiguous.
Having said all that…
I’m guilty of this, too. I was thinking of using the name Aleka for the female protagonist in my next novel. I was intending the pronunciation to be AL-eck-ah - accent on the first syllable and the first a sound like the a in apple. BUT the first (and only) person I showed the name to thought it was a-LAKE-ah. So I think that makes the name unusable.
ahhh diane: i have the same complaint & the same dilemma. I had a student once named “Ceilyn” and I loved the name. Decided to someday write a book & name the protag such. I did. But can anyone pronounce the name correctly? Or does it just irritate them? I currently have a student w/ the same pronunciation but spelled “Kalen”. Although I have partials out, I’m wondering if I should change the spelling(?) I dunno. But good post.
I too thought the name was a-LAKE-ah, so good decision on your part.
When I read your title, at first I thought you were going to write about something different and here it is, just for a laugh. When I wrote the first draft of my book, I didn’t have any names — none. At that point, I wanted to get the story down in some concrete form (before I forgot some of what I wanted to write), so I just wrote “girl”, “place”, etc. When I read your title I thought you were going to say you did the same thing. Anyway, reading through some of the early scenes without names was pretty funny.
As to what you really wrote about, I completely agree. I like YA Fantasy a lot, and I have waded through all kinds of names (some good, some not so much). Because of the “not so much”, and also because I wanted characters that young people would easily recognize and could talk about without sounding like they had left planet, I chose character names that were in a baby name book, not made up. Then, because it’s fantasy, I made up names for the places. Even then, I tried to make them easily pronounceable. Hopefully, I did.
Not alone, I too write (not much spec fiction anymore) and often change the names, because as a reader it drives me crazy.
And here I would have said ah-LEEK-uh. But it is pretty in any event.
Allecka would of course solve the problem and leave you able to use this beautiful name. I had the same dilemma with my children’s book (www.lothiandragons.co.uk) – when I got to a school to do an author visit, the teacher checked with me on the quiet how they should be pronouncing the names, and I hadn’t realised there was a problem, as I’d lived with the dragons so long. Too late to change those though.
My vote is for sticking with your chosen names and perhaps finding a way to let readers know how they’re pronounced – via a textual device or even in an appendix or author note or whatever.
I can so relate. I find myself sticking to really simple names, mostly, when I write because I don’t like long, unpronounceable names. That said, I love Juliet Marillier’s books and she always has unusually named characters that use the Gallic pronunciation and spelling. Niamh doesn’t look like it’s pronounced Neve but I like the accuracy. The only thing I can think of is to have a pronunciation guide at the beginning of the book. As a reader I always appreciate those.
Surely, so long as the name is sufficiently easy that each reader can find a consistent pronounciation of their own, it’s not such a problem?
Possibly a bigger problem for fantasy is the adoption of consistent name sources. I see some people mixing together Latin sounding names, Northern European sounding ones, Celtic ones, and who knows what else. It’s annoying.
Personal names are a real problem, but place names tend to be descriptive anyway (Shanghai is literally On the Sea, Tokyo is Eastern Capital, Cambridge = the bridge on the River Cam, Washington in the UK was the Wassa family’s estate) , so it isn’t too hard to just extend that logic to the culture in your story. I’d agree with Stu that, after that, you find a consistent name source and let your readers decide how that sounds for themselves.