Pronounced
English is a rather strange language. It is filled with many different language influences, and it is full of conflicting grammatical rules. It is hard to find any good consistency to it, but sometimes that comes in handy.
As I've mentioned at least a couple times before, the character of The Anaconda in the Spiral Island storyline shares my name, because it began with a story that was originally explored in the first person and I am horrible at character naming. The problem with this is it maes it unintentionally appear like some poor self-insertion story, which is not what I intend to display really. I do intend to have cameo roles occasionally, but as myself, a game developer as part of the crowd and not as a focused role of the story. Being one of the main characters of the Spiral Island storyline is not intentional, but no other name fits the character, it's simply too ingrained in my mind to be able to rename him.
However, an unintentional side effect of English ended up bringing me to an alternative. The language is a vocal language, the written part of it came afterward. The problem comes from the fact that there were no strictly defined rules as they started recording the words for the written language, which means that the spellings of things is based on how someone decided it should be spelled. It may or may not be pronounced the way it is spelled, which of course leads to the necessity of phonics for learning English, but then leaves some confusion related to names.
The solution, as I discovered, comes into play related to names. My own last name is not pronounced they way it is spelled, it is pronounced "Chaney". Most people pronounce it as it is written, however, pronouncing it "Chee-knee". As things are stored in the mind aurally, and not generally as written words, a new solution comes into play. I can change the last name of the character to Chaney, making it separate from my own name, while at the same time not having to through an arduous task of not only coming up with a suitable new name for the character, but also replacing that name everywhere in my mind in relation to the vastly complex, much larger storyline that the Spiral Island Trilogy is only a small part of. All things are now set right, and the only thing that's still common between the two is the alias. Maybe changing to sRc is worth another shot.
Date posted: 05 September, 2008 Tags: english linguistic names pronunciation spiral_island
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