Names in Revelation Space

[McC]

I'm reading Revelation Space right now. About 3/4 the way through. Something I've been grappling with throughout the entire damn book is how to pronounce various names.

Dan Sylveste: is this sil-ves-té, or sil-vest, or something else altogether?
Pascale: pas-cal, pas-ca-lé, or something else?
Sajaki and Volyova are pretty straight-forward (assuming the former is sa-jah-kee), but what about Khouri (koo-ree?), Sudjic (soo-dyik?), and Kjarval (kyar-val?)?

SF&F books should always come with pronunciation guides. Hmp.

[Ford Prefect]

SF&F books should always come with pronunciation guides. Hmp.

Man, I was so happy when the first The Prince of Nothing book came with a pronunciation guide. In any case, I tended to pronounce Sylveste as 'sil-vest' and Pascale as 'pas-cal'. 'Koo-ree' seems about right, as does 'soo-dyik', though I pronounced Kjarval as though the k was silent. Going by my extensive familiarity with anime, Sajaki is more or less pronounced as it is written.

[Duckie]

From what I would guess, knowing what language they come from
Sil-vest. Paskāl, as in the measure. Sā-dzhā-kī. Vo-lyov-a (stress unknown). Xū-ri (stress unknown). Sū-dzhik. Cār-val (but see pronunciation notes)

ī = ee, like 'feet'
i = i, like 'pit'
ā = ah, like 'father'
ū = oo, like 'flew'
any other vowels are as you'd probably expect and are unmarked.
c= like the noise in 'choose' (tsh), only, ty. You say it with the blade of your tongue at the bit where the back of your top teeth merge into the gum, and the tya should sound like cha. Failing that, say 'cha'.
dzh= noise in english judge (dzhudzh)
ly= palatalised l (as in italian famiglia, gli; older BBC english Lute (lyoot), or just ly if you can't do that)
x= voiceless velar fricative. Pronounced like the ch in german (bach, doch, but not ich which is something different), or scottish loch. Or Hebrew ch, as in Channukah.

Since you're reading in english there's no real reason to attempt to keep a foreign language's vowels straight, reading those as english should work.

[McC]

From what I would guess, knowing what language they come from

What language is that?

Since you're reading in english there's no real reason to attempt to keep a foreign language's vowels straight, reading those as english should work.

Isn't English the native language of the novel? I was under the impression that Reynolds was British.

In any case, my thanks to you both.

[Duckie]

ghetto edit- ly and c are produced on the same area, so you should know if you're getting it right. ñ in spanish and possibly also the n in oNion (unyun) are also palatalised, so it should be easier to predict if you know the tongue placement for that.

But really, 'ly' and 'tsh' (english ch) should work.

[Duckie]

Sylveste is french, and pronounced as such- the e is silent. Pascale is as well.

Volyova is obviously Russian, although whether it's a real russian name I do not know- creating fictional Russian names is tricky.

Khouri is almost assuredly Arabic Khūri or Khūrī in english romanisation.

Kjarval is Icelandic, and thus the odd pronunciation of Kj. C is incidentally my favorite sound the human mouth can make. Tya!

Sajaki was trickier. J in any sensible language represents what english spells y, but english was romanised by frenchmen and french is at fault for it as well- in my opinion, it's either Japanese (english's fault) or Indonesian (france's fault). In either case it sounds the same though.

Sudjic is possibly indonesian. After decolonisation, the Indonesians changed J to Dj to make it more in line with how the language is pronounced (thus Djakarta for Jacarta). In any case, dj is almost assuredly 'dzh' if it's indonesian.

[McC]

Vo-lyov-a (stress unknown).

I would assume this is a Russian name (and Vympel, et. al. can jump down my throat if I butcher this one), and thus is pronounced /volˈgo.vɑ/, with the /g/ representing the y sound in the English yes (parsed out from here).

EDIT: Aha, you beat me to it.

[Duckie]

Yeah, that's what I meant. I didn't want to break out the IPA and write volʲova (size increased because superscript j is a fiddly symbol in some fonts and it becomes illegible sometimes), so I wrote it as 'volyova' for you.

[ThomasP]

I ended up reading it as Ford did, if that helps at all.

These names weren't even that bad compared to some others, either.

Isn't English the native language of the novel? I was under the impression that Reynolds was British.

He is. But he did a pretty good job of incorporating non-Anglo cultures into the RS setting. I got a strong impression that Yellowstone had a strong French background. It was good enough to fool me anyway

[andrewgpaul]

There's hints as to what cultures settled Yellowstone. IIRC, the USA founded the first colony, via frozen embryos raised by robots on arrival, but that colony failed (without any actual human role models, the colony suffered from increasing levels of sociopathic behaviour and wiped itself out). It's unclear what nation the "current" Yellowstone inhabitants are decended from, but given that known characters from there include the Sylveste family, Philippe Lascaille, Tom Drefus, Jane Aumonier, Roland Childe and The Mademoiselle, there's certainly a French influence. Not exclusively - there's also a Thalia Ng and Gaffney in The Prefect.

[Gigaliel]

There's hints as to what cultures settled Yellowstone. IIRC, the USA founded the first colony, via frozen embryos raised by robots on arrival, but that colony failed (without any actual human role models, the colony suffered from increasing levels of sociopathic behaviour and wiped itself out). It's unclear what nation the "current" Yellowstone inhabitants are decended from, but given that known characters from there include the Sylveste family, Philippe Lascaille, Tom Drefus, Jane Aumonier, Roland Childe and The Mademoiselle, there's certainly a French influence. Not exclusively - there's also a Thalia Ng and Gaffney in The Prefect.

IIRC Sky's Edge was settled by a confederation of South American states and is presumably Spanish/Portuguese. Russian (referred to as Russish) and English (also referred to as something in futurese, maybe Anglish*) are in common use amongst Ultras.

In Yellowstone, those in the upper class speak some bizarre combination of Québécois French and Cantonese (or was it Mandarin?) written in a unique chinese-style character set. Why was it Canadians and Chinese? I don't know.

The lower classes were a mishmash of colonists from everywhere, considering Yellowstone (and its orbitals) were the height of civilization for a while. As such they speak the languages of anyone who managed to get there. I think the "common tongue" was whatever the English equivalent was, although that mattered less in the Belle Epoch where people had translation implants.

*It might also be Americano, which I believe refers to the U.S.A. and it's more spanishy nature (also its language)? I swear the term Old Anglish came up.

[andrewgpaul]

I think English/Anglish/Amerikano is a dead, or at least obscure language by the time of the Revelation Space series (which is what, 2400AD onwards? the relativistic travel makes it confusing sometimes). Certainly, no-one recognised the national flags and symbols on John Brannigan's space suit (when he appears as his old, 21st-century self).

[Xenophobe3691]

Canasian is the language of the Demarchists, both on Europa and Yellowstone, it's a mix of chinese and quebecois french.

Norte is the common language, and it's a future version of english.

The Upper Classes, I believe, were from the first ships to leave Europa and settle other systems, but other than that, there are no classes in Demarchist culture (supposedly).