Warhammer 40K: So That’s How You Say It – According To Games Workshop
Games Workshop just released a new video with a few tips on how to pronounce a few hard to say words. Get ready for a food fight.
English is a tough language to speak. There’s a lot of weird rules about vowels and pronunciations that all have exceptions. It also doesn’t help that as a language it’s basically the last branch of a romance language that borrows heavily from the previous root languages. And it does it all willy-nilly at that.*
*Edit: Apparently English is NOT a romance language. It just borrows heavily from the Latin based romance languages on account of the invasion from Duke William of Normandy in 1066. But it’s actually part of the Germanic language family. That explains even MORE why English is so darn hard. Thanks to the commenter obbo12 for pointing that fun fact out.
So what does that have to do with Warhammer 40,000? Well, you’ve probably noticed that the Warhammer Universe has a lot of made-up words and names. They can be tricky to pronounce even as a native english speaker. You can read a word and think you know how it sounds but that might not be how the person who created/wrote that word intended it to be pronounced.
We haven’t had a ton of pronunciation guides in Warhammer. That’s only exacerbated the situation. But now Games Workshop is putting their foot down. Sort of. Even they can’t pronounce all the silly words right…
The Warhammer Pronunciation Guide
“To help you navigate the worst tongue twisters from Warhammer 40,000 – and because the impending release of Kill Team: Soulshackle has prompted many experimental pronunciations of ‘Arbites’ – we’ve collected some of the main offenders in an instructional video.”
If you watched it hoping it was a purely educational affair I hope you weren’t disappointed. I appreciate the tone they took with this video as it’s a bit more on the humorous side. That said, by the end of the video I think the point I was trying to make above still stands: English is hard and made-up words are even harder.
There are some helpful pronunciations for a few of the big words in 40k. And there’s a couple in there that will start a fight regardless of how “propper” you say it. I’m still going to call him rowboat. “Ar-Bee-Tees” is dumb. And if there’s the “f” sound in Lieutenant…then why did you spell it that way?! How do you even pronounce “worchestire” sauce?!?!!?
Heck, here at BoLS we still don’t agree internally on how to say Lascannon. It’s based on Laser, right? So that pronounced “lay-zr” which we can all agree on. But it’s spelled “lascannon” …so that would make it “las” because there’s not an additional vowel paired with it to give it the long “a” sound? Confused yet? Me too. Welcome to English and and the etymology of words.
The fun part is that words can also change pronunciation overtime. You can have the root word from one language and over time it can be changed into a new word/pronunciation over time, too. And sometimes that word have have different meanings. Here’s an example when it comes to Sausage. Specifically boudin and how it likely became pudding.
Is this an “American-English” vs “British-English” thing? It’s not meant to be. But this certainly highlights some of the difference that time and distance can have on language. It’s certainly going to ruffle some feathers out there but we can all agree on one thing: It’s just The Great Rift now, right?
Words are hard. Speaking them can be even harder.
