I was perusing the blurbs of some of the new sci-fi romances over on Amazon, and I discovered one odd fact. In many cases, if the male is the one who's from another planet/galaxy, his name is unpronounceable. More often than not, it also has apostrophes in it. Examples: K'norr, Gra'dish en Me'vahu, MyrNow, I will admit that I've tried to keep my characters' names from becoming too tongue-tangling. In several cases, I resolved that issue by giving them a "similar" name. In other words, I took a familiar word, then changed one or two letters. (Ex: Ryan - Rion). But in most instances, I've made the attempt to keep the monikers one syllable in length.
However, there have been a time or two when someone's asked me to help with the pronunciation of a name. The one most frequently asked? AEQUANA. The A and E are combined Greek-style, making my mermaid heroine's name either "Ee-quana" or "Eh-quana". Either way is fine. And either way, it doesn't make any difference as long as a reader wants to read one of my books.
1 comment:
My husband has drilled into my head to give my characters pronounceable names lol. He said how it drives him nuts when he reads fantasy books and you can't tell what the character's name is or it has a billion apostrophes.
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