What lore do you ignore?

[Cleretic]

You know how the Ys franchise is pronounced, yes?

Wrong, and bad choice of evidence anyway: Ys is written イース, which is roughtly 'isu' with that long 'ee' sound.

The Japanese Y sound is one of those consonants that only exists with trailing vowel sounds, but is usually with that sharp, shorter 'Y' sound; 'Ya', 'Ye', 'Yo', and so on. Y'shtola and Y'mhitra's names specifically starts with the 'Ya' character, but their names are in katakana so it's treated as a loan word.

[DreadCrow]

You know how the Ys franchise is pronounced, yes?

Ys being pronounced the way it does have absolutely nothing to do with Japanese and everything to do with a legendary French city that was supposedly swallowed up by the ocean.

[KatiaRelanah]

There's a cursory pronunciation guide for Seeker prefixes in the Race Naming Conventions thread. So, based on that, it should be "yah-SHTO-la" and "goo-RA-ha" respectively (or "goo-RAH-a", perhaps; the pronunciation for given names isn't detailed, except to say that aitches are usually unvoiced by non-Miqo'te because of their peculiarity -- and with that in mind, it's possible that the "sh" in "shtola" wouldn't be pronounced as a digraph in the Miqo'te language either, but that's neither here nor there).

Some actors get close enough with "yeh-" or "yuh-SHTO-la", which really doesn't bother me much, but you'll hear others say "ish-TO-la" (following the pronunciation logic used for "Ysayle").

Conversely, there's at least an internal consistency to the pronunciation of "G'raha" in the dub that makes that change a lot more palatable to me, since although it's different, the difference is always the same. But would I like to hear the "proper" pronunciation? Yes lol.

All that said, I do have one gripe with the aforementioned pronunciation guide, and that's its treatment of F. If I'm understanding correctly, we're told it works the same way the dub treats the prefix in "G'raha", where it simply merges with the first syllable of the given name. It works for a name like F'lhammin, or with any given name that starts with a vowel, or R, Y, or W, but that's it. Try to say "fsteak" lol.

A schwa-ed Y collapses down to a sound not dissimilar to a long ee sound. I put the rest down to accents/force of habit.

Along similar lines, try getting a person with an accent where they say Mare-eeo to play Super Mario 64, and even with Mario literally yelling "ITS-A-ME, MAH-RIO!" on the startup screen; they'll still turn around and five minutes later say "yeah mare-eeo 64 is a great game!"

[Turnintino]

Seeker name pronunciation really deserves to be its own thread, not tacked into this separate topic.

You're probably right, but it was a combination of "this reminded me and feels tangentially related" and "I'm not quite invested enough to make a separate thread" lol. Regardless, I apologize if this was a derailment.

The thing is, that is essentially how it's pronounced, but the "oo" part is so short that you skim over it and end up with "gRA". It's generally how Japanese representation of English sounds would work.

Not at all inconceivable to me, but taking the pronunciation guide at face value, imperfect though it is, I'm still inclined to disagree with the treatment. That said, again, the pronunciation of his name is an instance I take the least issue with.

I think it relates back to your last paragraph. The "oo" sound would come out more if you needed it as a a dividing sound because the following given name doesn't flow nicely from the starting letter. Thus F'lhaminn can be pronounced with "fLA" but with a less compatible name it would be more of a "fu".

This, I agree with pretty much entirely, especially as it relates to the F prefix. It's a bizarre oversight, I think, to present it the way that it is. And if they'd described the rules the way you do, my only real criticism would be the lack of internal consistency for "Y'shtola" as it appears in the English dub.

And maybe the team at the time did consider those things, but opted to simplify the guide for easier consumption. Regardless, here we are.

A schwa-ed Y collapses down to a sound not dissimilar to a long ee sound. I put the rest down to accents/force of habit.

It would be silly to say I disagree, but I'd argue that the two sounds still aren't so closely related that we should be hearing them all simultaneously from characters in the same social circle. But as I said earlier, that's a directorial issue.

I've touched on this with "G'raha", but I don't think I would bemoan the "Y'shtola" issue nearly so much if it were at least consistent. It would still bug me if it didn't resemble what we'd been taught previously, but at least it would still feel grounded.

[Turnintino]

Along similar lines, try getting a person with an accent where they say Mare-eeo to play Super Mario 64, and even with Mario literally yelling "ITS-A-ME, MAH-RIO!" on the startup screen; they'll still turn around and five minutes later say "yeah mare-eeo 64 is a great game!"

Lmao absolutely. I said earlier that I think most of us are familiar with that kind of thing irl. And in the case of "yeh" or "yuh" versus "yah", the discrepancy is so minor that only the most pedantic of nerds would take real issue with it. And that's also indisputably an accent thing, like you said. The "ish" pronunciation feels like a bigger stretch to me. But back to what I keep saying about internal consistency, I could more easily accept it if it were the one pronunciation that we heard across the board, even if I still think it's the furthest from the localization's original intent.

[KatiaRelanah]

The thing is, that is essentially how it's pronounced, but the "oo" part is so short that you skim over it and end up with "gRA". It's generally how Japanese representation of English sounds would work.

English leans towards schwas/collapsed vowel sounds. "I've got to go to the store" becomes "I've got duh go duh duh store" in most native speech patterns.

You can hear it in Japanese with something as simple as desu, the trailing vowel will basically disappear if it's the last word in a phrase and be pronounced more like "dess", with like the barest hint of a voiced vowel at the end.

[KatiaRelanah]

Lmao absolutely. I said earlier that I think most of us are familiar with that kind of thing irl. And in the case of "yeh" or "yuh" versus "yah", the discrepancy is so minor that only the most pedantic of nerds would take real issue with it. And that's also indisputably an accent thing, like you said. The "ish" pronunciation feels like a bigger stretch to me. But back to what I keep saying about internal consistency, I could more easily accept it if it were the one pronunciation that we heard across the board, even if I still think it's the furthest from the localization's original intent.

Do you happen to speak Spanish? I ask because consider the sound made for the Spanish Y.

It's typically anglicized as a J, but the J-ness of the sound is so subtle that it's hard to perceive based on one's accent and/or familiarity with the language. And, practical experience, make a "yuh" sound with your mouth; now make a "juh" sound with the absolute weakest J you can muster. You'll notice that the difference between the two is mere millimeters of tongue movement.

Yet for casual speech and listening, Yolanda with a very hard yuh sound is virtually indistinguishable from the soft juh sound.

I do think that, since this is a discussion thread on lore accuracy, what's to say that Y'shtola isn't SUPPOSED to FUNCTIONALLY be in a similar "so subtle you might miss it" position? Which is to say, you can be taught to replace the Y with a J as a non-spanish speaker, and TECHNICALLY it's right? But in practice it sounds fake and forced, and outs you as a non-native

So what if clan prefixes are similarly unvoiced, and for the sake of convenience/academic exaggeration they say "so it's pronounced YUH-Shtola" when that communicates the general idea of the sound, and realistically it's more subtle than that? Try saying Y'shtola with the shortest Y sound you can make, and you'll hear that without the exaggerated jaw-separation for a "true" Y sound, it becomes virtually imperceptible.

[Cleretic]

Alphinaud pronounced Asahi two different ways between 5.x and Endwalker. 'Bahamut' is pronounced two different ways in the same cutscene at least once. This stuff generally doesn't bother me, mostly because I find English speakers have a lot of variance in pronunciation of things anyway, both personally and by dialect. And even in real life a lot of it's a hell of a lot bigger than stuff like the unwritten conjunctive vowel sound used in a one-letter name prefix.

Honestly, Alphinaud and Thancred consistently being different about Y'shtola's name, despite being friends with Y'shtola, just reads to me like she's not actually bothered by this at all. And yeah, that sounds like Y'shtola to me.


Looking to the Japanese VO seems like a good angle, but I find it's not as useful of one as you'd want, since often the names vary in spelling or pronunciation anyway; 'Krile' is just 'Kururu' (which is why she's a lalafel), Mhach's official pronunciation is completely different from how it's written in Japan because Japanese straight-up doesn't have the 'ch' sound it uses.

[Turnintino]

Yeah, like I said in my initial post about this, inconsistent pronunciation is a problem in general. And I'll keep saying it, that's a failure on the current ADR team's part that I wish they would improve on. I don't want the ARR cast back, but whoever was voice-directing at the time was better at keeping that kind of thing straight.

I also don't personally put much stock in Japanese pronunciation versus English, at least as it pertains to non-Japanese names, but I didn't wanna disregard Ryu's suggestion out of hand. Regardless, it's clear that it isn't taken into account by ADR, whether or not it supports what we were taught about it.

Re: the Alphinaud and Thancred thing, it just breaks my immersion too much. I could rationalize it all I want, but I know it's just oversight on the production side lol. In-character, I think both boys are too keen to make that mistake for long. And in EW, Y'shtola says her name herself (I think she went with the "ish" pronunciation) in front of them both when they arrive at Sharlayan. I personally think Alphinaud would've been mortified if he'd suddenly learned he'd been mispronouncing her name all this time lmao.

[Iscah]

Looking to the Japanese VO seems like a good angle, but I find it's not as useful of one as you'd want, since often the names vary in spelling or pronunciation anyway; 'Krile' is just 'Kururu' (which is why she's a lalafel), Mhach's official pronunciation is completely different from how it's written in Japan because Japanese straight-up doesn't have the 'ch' sound it uses.

Krile is an odd one out because they're not trying to represent the same name. Because she is a reference back to a character in FFV whose name was changed for the English dub, they are maintaining that change here and excusing it as "she uses a Hyuran version of her real name" which presumably is still originally the Plainsfolk-sounding Kururu.