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.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

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/.

Ryan Denzer-King said...

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

Sszark said...

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

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