Talk:Elder Speech/@comment-26832753-20150823113150/@comment-70.24.22.156-20150826052442

For the most part, you'll likely be pretty safe to roughly phonetically sound the words out. Elder Speech, despite what the article header says, has relatively more Welsh words (most anything with a Y in it) than Irish, and its Irish tends to be that which doesn't have the tricksome bh/dh/th/gh sounds. The only word I can off hand think of that actually has an Irish spelling and follows the actual Irish rules is seidhe (which is rendered in modern Irish as sí, a lot easier to read as 'shee' imo). Aen Seidhe is indeed 'En Shee'.

This ignoring of the d has to do with the fact 'dh' is either a throaty 'gh' sound or a 'y' depending on what vowels are in front of it in Irish. I and E are slender and therefore you'd get y. A, O, and U are broad, so you get gh. Thus in your example it becomes a y [read as 'yih'/y glide = 'kay-lyi']. Seidhe seems to be a bit of an exception, as Wiki tells me it's read as 'sheeth-uh' because apparently reasons :'D.

As for most of the other words, sounding it out should be fine. Even based on Sapowski's collected dictionary, there's no real consistency as to when he uses special pronunciation for dh/th or renders it as we might say it in English. For example, deireadh (end) is 'dered' but teadh (bard) becomes 'teu'. So it's kind of a big old shrug or whatever the voice director told the actors.

I believe this is a copy of the dictionary that once lived on Andrzej Sapkowski's web site and it offers some pronunciations for the words, albeit you'll need to account for them being in a Polish accent (and some, like words with Ws, have typically been anglicized in the games to an English W instead of the Polish 'v' sound).

http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20121117094337/wiedzmin/images/f/f8/Slowniksm.png


 * indicates an English 'th' sound


 * indicates a French 'eu' as in deux/peux


 * seems to indicate a sound between y/a/i, based on a quick google translate