I now pronounce you…(?)

You know what’s wonderful about the Internet? You can type a word and “pronunciation” into Google and come up with an audio file of people speaking it. That’s not something I had as a kid, and oh how my reading and writing vocabulary often outpaced my ability to express verbally. It doesn’t help to be dealing with English, which even as a native speaker is a confusing mess where we pretend there are rules, but it seems like the only real rules are that there are no rules. Take for example the word “subterfuge,” which comes from the same root as “subtle” — the Latin “subter-” which as you might also guess is the root of “subterranean.” It’s all about being sneaky or unseen or underground (the last one literally in the case of subterranean). Alas, I first ran across “subterfuge” reading the Vampire: The Masquerade RPG in the 1990s and associated it more with subtle, thus for years pronouncing it with a silent ‘b’. It turns out that subterfuge and subterranean both quite vocally pronounce “sub” unlike subtle which sounds more like “suttle” when said out loud. You can kind of blame the French for this (as well as a lot of other weirdness in English pronunciation) since they took the Latinate word “subtilis” but somewhere in Old French -> Middle English it became the word “sotil,” discarding the ‘b’ sound and ensuring a very confused Clint hundreds of years hence. Unlucky King Harold took an arrow to the eye in the Battle of Hastings and the rest, as they say, is history.

Anyhow, this phenomenon can present some unique challenges when you’re writing books or comics or such where the words are not spoken aloud. Hell, it’s even cropped up during get-together parties back in the day where I met people I knew from an MMO and discovered I’d been pronouncing their character name all wrong all this time, and vice-versa. Sometimes you’re dealing with foreign languages and your reader may be totally unaware that “Siobhan” is a gaelic name pronounced to sound sort of like “Shuh-VON,” not “SEE-oh-bon” like I sometimes hear in my head to this day. Sometimes you’re making up entirely new words or languages and hoo boy, that’s something a reader can’t even look up unless you yourself put out a pronunciation guide. Tolkien did, but how many of us read it? Well, Peter Jackson I suppose, and bless his heart for it.

So Rosa first mentioned “specie” in passing back in Issue/Episode 3, and while that’s not a word I made up, it’s hardly in common use anymore. How did it sound it your head when you read it? Well, if you pronounced it as if it were the singular of “species” — SPEE-shee — you are correct! But species is always plural and refers to animals, while specie always refers to coinage. Same Latin root, “form or kind,” no French interpolation, and yet English breaks the rules yet again by having the meaning change completely depending on whether or not you stick an ‘s’ on the end.

But at least the pronunciation is consistent. On the other hand, in the comic before the current one I had the cops shout out “freeze, speecer!” at the would-be thief of said coins. But it would be pronounced “speesher” wouldn’t it? Here’s where I’m in trouble making up a word and would have to be generous if someone heard it in their heads with a straight “s” rather than “sh” sound in the middle. Specier or specer or spesher all lost out in my composition raffle. Perhaps I will regret this decision in the future, but onwards we go.

It is perhaps appropriate “specie” was first uttered in the comic by Rosa, whose own last name I am rather convinced a good portion of the readership hear in their heads as “am-uh-RILL-uh” when she uses the Spanish pronunciation of “ahm-uh-REE-yuh” and it does not help at all that Texas has an actual town called Amarillo which is pronounced the first way (with the “l” sound), because Texas. So if you hear it that way you’re absolutely forgiven, though I still reserve the right to joke about it in the comic at some point in the FYOO-churr.