Pronunciation

By ColtsFan76, in 6. AGoT Spoiler Space

I am almost through the third book and my wife just finished the first one. We are having trouble figuring out some of the names and I was wondering where we could find a pronunciation guide to the names.

Names like "Robb" and "Brandon" are easy enough. Names like "Arya" and "Tyrion" we can't quite agree on. It's hard to tell if the Y is just replaing an I or sound more like an english Y. Is it "ARE-ya" "AR-ee-ah" or something else? We thought maybe "Ar-ee-ah" since she goes by Ari at times.

Any help?

The "y" tends to be different for different words.

For Arya, Martin says that his pronunciation (it's hard to ever say the "correct" pronunciation for fantasy novels...) is "ARE-ya." A lot of people slip into "Ar-EE-uh" as often as not, including the narrators for the audiobook versions of the novels. Anyway, according to Martin, the "y" is just a "y."

But for Tyrion, most people, including Martin, say "TEAR-ree-on" (and that's "tear" as is "cry a tear," not "tear apart"), so a short "i" sound. But the city-state/country of Lys is apparently pronounced "LICE" and Catelyn's sister is "LIE-sa," which is a long "i" sound. So you can see, the "y" is not consistent.

Here's an interesting website for all-things Westeros:

http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/

If you do a search for "pronunciation," you can see a lot of entries on times when people have asked Martin directly how to pronounce things and his response. There is a ton of other cool stuff there, too.

Good to hear. I did a little more digging on my own and it seems GRRM prefers to keep it vague so everyone can imagine them as they want. Thanks for the input!

What I love about this topic is we have a fellow in our play group who has the greatest mispronunciations. He likes to refer to Edward Stark, and once his wife Catherine. We played BSG the other night, and he revealed to us that he just drew the Cylon Synthesizer card. Priceless!

On a similar note, when I first read the books I kept pronouncing it Jame Lannister, since the "i" was before the "m." Months later I was running a D&D campaign where one of the players was named Jamie and another named his character "Jaime." He decided we should call his character Jame instead, as that was how he first pronounced the Kingslayer's name as well, to keep the two of them straight.