Potter Pronunciations

[Prof. Sky Alton]

It's leviosa, not Leviosar

Gail's topic about audio books over on Book Talk reminded me of a friend who once said the Harry Potter films annoyed her because when reading the books to her, her dad had pronounced Slytherin very differently. I remember being slightly annoyed myself that the audio book and films differed in their pronunciation of accio: for me having grown up with Stephen Fry, it was 'axio' (like access) not 'akio' (though I think Latin does call for a hard C). Most notoriously, JK Rowling pronounces Voldemort differently to most of us, with a silent T.

Are there any Potter pronunciations that bother you? Having learned 'the correct way', do you try to adjust the way you think about them?

[Prof. Tarma Amelia Black]

Wonderful topic!

I was mostly grateful when I watched the first movie and found out how to pronounce Hermione's name.

That was HUGE to me. Grawp's attempt and Viktor Krum's attempt to pronounce her name had nothing on mine!

[Gail Allen]

Names are the bane of my existence! I read the four firat books in another language which meant I read all names to be pronounced like this other language would call for them to be pronounced. Mostly Hermione changed A LOT in my mind, but I do think of her name 'correctly' when I read and think if in English. In Danish... I think of it wastly differently.

Some names also entirely changed - and some just a little. Remus Lupin for instance is in danish called Remus Lupus because it's not obvious enough as it is. Kingsley's last name is also spelled differently and Madeye Moody is called Skrækøje Dunder. So thing changed in those cases. In other cases things didnt change at all though. But for those characters it's something I really had to get used to.

[Prof. Dario Brighton]

Having read the books in English, Croatian and Serbian, I can say that I learnt a lot about the pronunciation of different characters and spells.

The Croatian language forbids for proper nouns originating from other languages to be transliterated. They should instead be translated (to preserve the native words and prevent borrowing foreign ones) or kept in their original form to honour the foreign language if no translation is available. Because of that, the Croatian books didn't really teach me anything about how to pronounce the words. Names with some meaning were translated into the language and names with no significant meaning remained the same. Thus Mad-Eye became Ludooki (lit. Crazy-Eyed) and Ron Weasley remained just that.

On the other hand, the Serbian language is the complete opposite. Foreign words should be translated if there is an adequate interpretation and if there is none, they will be transliterated to mimic the foreign language's pronunciation as closely as possible in Serbian. The language itself is very strict in terms of spelling and pronunciation. Every character in a word stands for an unambiguous sound. Now, this combination gives some very freaky transliterations.

Mad-Eye remained Ludooki because it could be translated, but unline in Croatian, Ron Weasley would be transliterated to Ron Vizli. This is as close as one can get to pronouncing Weasely using the tools the Serbian language offers.

In Slavic countries, we are usually taught Germanic pronunciation of Latin in schools and that is how most of the spells were transliterated. Accio becomes Asio, Expelliarmus becomes Ekspeliarmus and Expecto Patronum becomes Ekspekto Patronum.

Also, the Serbian translators, for some reason, knew that Voldemort should originally be pronounced with a silent T. This is why he's called Voldemor in Serbian and probably why Rowling's pronunciation of that name stuck with me.

[Prof. Alexander Brighton]

There's a couple names from Harry Potter that i was pronouncing wrong before.
Seamus is one of them, I kept pronouncing it like "seemus", I didn't know it was actually pronounced "shaymus" until somebody told me. I sometimes forget it's pronounced "shaymus", but I have adjusted to it.

One that a couple of my friends had trouble with was Sirius. One of my friends thought it was pronounced like the word "serious" which it is, but another friend thought it was pronounced "sirus".

[Evie Figg]

I suppose there aren't any pronunciations that bother me, however it was difficult to transition into saying it the correct way once I learned it! For me, it was "Accio" as I wanted to say "Assio"

[Galena May]

So, I used to read Hermione as ' Her-mee-own', until one of my friends during the ongoing Harry Potter craze in my college days told me that it was supposed to be pronounced as ' Her-my oh-knee'. My Viktor Krum moment, lol! Obviously I hadn't watched the movies yet so I hadn't heard her name spoken and had only read the first book when this happened, otherwise I would have known when she told Viktor Krum how to pronounce her name or when they were teaching Grawp her name.

[Dibyarup James Potter]

Okay, here's a fun one. I had watched the movies first and later read the books, since I did not really like reading books when I was young. So I always used to think that the Tickling Charm's incantation is "Rictumsempra" instead of "Rictusempra" (Ric-tuh-sem-pra). So when I actually read the books, I learnt that the extra "m" I used to pronounce was wrong.