Why make things hard to pronounce?

[Iscah]

"Azys" seems easy enough to pronouce for me, but they definitely could have left the second 'L' out of "Lla".

Another one that's awkward to pronounce, Sidurgu (Cid Oor Goo?) versus Shidagu (She Da Goo), which rolls off the tongue pretty easy. I understand the desire to not want things to sound "too Japanese" by probably both Eastern and Western teams, but why not just go with Sigurd?

I don't see how one is more difficult than the other, but in any case "Sidurgu" isn't meant to be a Japanese name (or an attempt to westernise one) in the first place. The Xaela have Mongolian names. The English version is probably closer to the intended pronounciation while "Shidagu" is simply the closest they could get to spelling it in katakana.

Meanwhile the names that actually are meant to be Japanese are not changed in translation.


All the races have their own intended language equivalents, and it's very worthwhile reading the Race Naming Conventions in the Lore forum to understand the intent behind them.

Uru'da instead of Ul'dah (is it Ool Da? Uhl Da?).

Again, I don't think the alternate translation would make it any easier to pronounce - if anything, slightly harder as it puts in an extra syllable - and makes it look like they just took the katakana literally instead of asking what the Japanese writer was intending. Eorzea is full of non-Japanese names. Did they want to call it Uru'da or were they unable to write "Ul"?

I didn't think about it until now but the apostrophe helps the English pronounciation anyway. You know it's not "Uld-ah".



(Personally I struggle more with French pronounciation for the Elezen names.) :/