Why make things hard to pronounce?

[Eloah]

I find this thread sorta funny, lol. Sorry I hope it doesn't come across as disrespectful but here are some things that might help things make sense.

Okay to start, Japanese only has their set number of pronunciations, which in total is like 150 or so; its a really small number. English on the other hand has over 4,000 pronunciations, as well as many other non Asian influenced languages. in order to fix this, new characters were added to the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana charters to represent more "western" pronunciations. This is the reason why the myth that Shiva originally being Shiver is false since the characters for Shiva are シヴァ the last "two" being a new character to represent Va.

The next thing to indicate is that there are certain characters that they use in place of some of our more "complex" sounds. Su representative of our Th is the most common example. These characters are actually what denote a similar sound in other languages not necessarily the corresponding letter. For example an elongated A or O sound would/could represent an Er sound. And while most people are aware of the changing of these characters with the " marks, they may not know that is to vocalize the sound, something we do in other languages naturally. In these instances its to show the reader that its the vocalized version, even if the translated letter isn't. This is the case with the Fantasy, in Final Fantasy, ファンタジー the final character is Ji the voiced version of Shi, to make the reader aware of the proper pronunciation.

So lets see if I can address some of these questions now, XD

English: Azys Lla
Japanese: アジス・ラー
Romanization: Asiju Ra

English: Sidurgu
Japanese: シダグ
Romanization: Shidagu

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

For Azys Lla the Romaji would be A-Ji-Su Ra. As for pronouncing it, it would be close to saying "Ah jeez" with Ra being the same regardless

As for Sidurgu's name you have the Romaji correct but you are connecting the D with the Shi not the A where it goes. if the D was ment to be with the Shi character the next one would be Du not Da. Break it up like Shi Da Gu and you can see that it's "Si Durg" in English. The u is a left over phoneme, that has a sound but is virtually silent, similar to the Os in both Dorothy and Deborah; they are always pronounced but usually aren't "actively" pronounced.

With Ul'dah, you have to remember that Japanese most kana are the equivalent of an English consonant and vowel combined, Ra, Du, Mu, or just a vowel, A, E, I, O, U, they only have one character that is just a consonant for us, N. That being said, sometimes they will write loan words that don't have all of those extra vowels, in these cases they use the character that has the least vowel sound to represent just that one letter, "(letter)u". The U in these characters is almost silent so it doesn't sound like it's there. That's why Uru'Da is Ul'Dah, the R(L) is all they want to represent.

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

The double LL is a Digraph. Most of us are probably pronouncing it wrong, as just one l, but it's an actual character.