Thursday, July 10, 2008

Sszark the Burning

As anyone who has played the video game Diablo II can attest, the best part is the names of the unique characters. These include the venerable Frozenstein, Puke Pus the Sharp, and one that hadn't caught my eye until recently: Sszark the Burning. The real question here is, how do the game designers want us to pronounce this? Is that a long "s" at the beginning, followed by a [z]? Maybe the "ss" is a syllable nucleus, as can be the case in Blackfoot: ss.zark. Or is it an "s" followed by the Hungarian "sz" for /s/, giving a long s cluster at the beginning: ssaɹk. It's a mystery to me, but either way it's a great name.
at

3 comments:

  1. AnonymousJuly 19, 2008 at 10:55 PM

    I believe <ssz> is the usual way of writing a geminate /ss/ in Hungarian (i.e., the <z> takes scope over both <s>s, so that you don't have to write <szsz>). So you could pronounce the whole thing à la hongroise as /ssɒrk/.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ryan Denzer-KingJuly 20, 2008 at 1:31 PM

    Fascinating! Thanks for clearing that up; I don't know much about Hungarian.

    ReplyDelete
  3. SszarkAugust 26, 2008 at 8:42 AM

    yey that's my nickname ;) And a domain i've just parked: sszark.ru ;)

    I pronounce is like [za'k] not pronouncing "s"

    ReplyDelete