While reading Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords Player's Guide by F. Wesley Schneider, I came upon a passage about a clandestine organization in Varisia:
These rogues belong to a loosely-organized association of bandits, smugglers, and thieves called the Sczarni (SCAR-nee). The Scarni [sic] rarely prey upon other natives of the land ... (p. 9)
Having grown up around speakers of Polish, what immediately caught my attention was the group of consonants in the name of the organization, scz. That's not a combination that would appear in English, and likely looks rather intimidating to USonians not used to seeing Eastern-European languages, hence the pronunciation guide. However, the guide is misleading. My native USonian wife pronounces it something like \s'kzarni:\, while I would say it more like \s'tʃarni:\. Either way, the cz combination is not simplified to a \k\ sound with the z being "silent." It seems like the writer or the publisher had the same thought, since two words later, the name is misspelled, dropping the "silent z."
So, that having been said, here is my main issue with Sczarni and Mr. Schneider: what possible benefit is there to adding extraneous consonants to a fantastic name? Sure, we have all experienced the USonian fascination with Xs, Zs, and apostrophes in fantasy names (e.g. Drizzt Do'Urden), and I can even stomach that to some extent, but Schneider goes even further. Not only is he adding an extra z, but he then makes it silent! In effect, the z serves a purely aesthetic function, making the name more exotic at the expense of readability, which the author knew about, since he felt the need to provide pronunciation guide.
What makes this even worse, however, is the author's -- likely subconscious -- assumption that the language spoken by the Sczarni not only uses Latin alphabet, but also works like English. How do I know that? If that were not the case, then the word Sczarni itself would be a transcription into English of the alien language that engendered it, and therefore would be phonetic and would not require an additional pronunciation guide. As an example, consider what would happen if the Player's Guide was transliterated into another Earth language, say Chinese or Russian, both of which have pronunciation rules that are more regular than in English. You cannot, for example, write it in Russian as Скзарни and then insist that it's pronounced Скарни. It would be similarly nonsensical if one transliterated the word into Chinese characters, say 斯可自兒尼 (sī kě zì ér ní), and then insisted that it ought to be pronounced as 斯可兒尼 (sī kě ér ní), dropping a character1.
So, in conclusion, I think that in addition to the common advice not to overuse Xs, Zs, and apostrophes, we ought to add one more: when writing them in English, treat the names as phonetic transcriptions. Granted, when I think about it, I'm guilty of doing this as well. In a recent game, I had an NPC whose name was Ariane Schulze (i.e. Ariane Constable), whose last name used German orthography instead of the phonetic Shultse. I shall watch out for this in the future, however.
- Apologies to the native speakers for my inexpert Chinese transliterations. ↩
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