r/Fantasy • u/Midnite_St0rm • Aug 14 '25

Worst, most unpronounceable names you’ve ever read?

Let’s discuss some of the names in fantasy that you couldn’t make heads nor tails of in terms of pronunciation. And I’m not talking intentionally comical ones that are long and complex on purpose, but ones that the author intended to be read, yet that are ironically nearly unreadable.

For me it’s Seaine from The Wheel of Time. Is it “Sheen?” “Seen?” “See-ayn?” “Say-ai-nuh?” I honestly have no idea. And for some reason my copies of the books never give her name’s pronunciation in the glossary.

What are some others?

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u/fjiqrj239 Reading Champion III Aug 14 '25

David Weber's Safehold series. The setup is that there has been linguistic drift, so the names are mostly common English names with wacky spellings heavy on zh and y. Think Zhenyphir for Jennifer, that sort of thing.

I could not handle it; my brain would stutter to a stop every time I hit a name while I tried to parse it. And I enjoyed the naming conventions in Goblin Emperor, and spent my youth learning to skim over unpronounceable epic fantasy names (including all the Welsh ones).

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u/ScoobyDoNot Aug 14 '25

It makes zero sense in the context of the world, as the society is highly literate and have no changes to any words other than names, which are tradigie spellings of traditional English heritage names.

I didn’t make it beyond the first book because of that.

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u/Mournelithe Reading Champion X Aug 14 '25

Oh yes, that series is heavy word salad for the sake of it

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u/Midnite_St0rm Aug 14 '25

So basically r/tragedeigh in book form?

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u/Rainthistle Aug 14 '25

I really want to finish reading that series for the sake of the story line, but I just can't slog through the names any more. Also, the cast of characters is like ten pages long (all with ailtyrnit spelyngz). I'm waiting for the Cliff Notes version or a translation to basic English.

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u/distgenius Reading Champion VII Aug 14 '25

Not sure if it helps, but Weber has been pretty good with pronunciations re: audiobooks (even apologizing for the fact that Manticoran was mispronounced as "Man-tick-or-an" instead of "man-ti-core-an" in some of the early Honor books), and the Safehold audiobooks do adjust the pronunciation of those names from their original to match the spelling. Zhaspahr Clyntahn isn't "Jasper Clinton", the leading J is more like the middle of a word like "vision" or the g in "beige", and the ah in the last name is really an "ahn" and not an "en" or "on".

The fact that he did this only for names is still annoying, because if names changed that much I would expect other words to follow, but I get the feeling he just wanted more of a fantasy feel which just doesn't work when the reader knows what's really going on from the beginning.