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Topic: Hubpages review (Read 2539 times) |
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Fritzlein
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Arimaa player #706
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Posts: 5928
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Re: Hubpages review
« Reply #1 on: Oct 19th, 2010, 5:03pm » |
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on Oct 19th, 2010, 3:13pm, qswanger wrote:| I think I kinda like his pronunciation of Arimaa better |
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I quite like the pronunciation in the song "Arima Arima", since that was more or less what I guessed it would be on my own.
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megajester
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Istanbul, Turkey
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Re: Hubpages review
« Reply #2 on: Oct 20th, 2010, 12:38am » |
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This probably belongs in another post, but I would like to say something about the pronounciation. Double "a"s in words or foreign names are invariably pronounced "aah" (eg. aardvark, Aaliyah, Saatchi, Aasif, Kaan etc.) so when I first saw "Arimaa" I instinctively pronounced it as "a-ree-MAA", not "a-REE-muh." It took me a long time to get used to the "official" pronounciation, and my father never did, even though he really likes the game and I consistently referred to the game using its official pronounciation when showing it to him. Maybe it's a British thing, I dunno.
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Fritzlein
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Arimaa player #706
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Re: Hubpages review
« Reply #3 on: Oct 20th, 2010, 12:46am » |
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You have it right. The irony is that Omar didn't know why "Aamir" is spelled with two a's in the first place!  But I suppose if they had pronounced the game ah-ree-MAH there would have been plenty of people guessing wrong the other way.
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Isaac Grosof
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Longtime Arimaa Fan
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Re: Hubpages review
« Reply #4 on: Oct 20th, 2010, 5:54pm » |
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In my name, Isaac, the double a is similarly confusing. I pronounce it as a short "i" or a short "a". Its another sound altogether from the one(s) in Arimaa.
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Sorry about that one thing.
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rbarreira
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Arimaa player #1621
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Posts: 605
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Re: Hubpages review
« Reply #5 on: Oct 20th, 2010, 6:38pm » |
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I don't understand how he ended up with "Air-Uh-MAY-Uh". Some kind of joke or... ?
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omar
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Arimaa player #2
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Re: Hubpages review
« Reply #6 on: Oct 21st, 2010, 1:27pm » |
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I tend not to give too much thought to things like names or themes. The name and even how it is pronounced was a spur of the moment decision 
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"Hey Aamir, lets invent a new game" I said interrupting his chain of thought for his next move. He gave me an excited look and said "A new game, like Chess?". "Yea, what should we call it?" I asked while trying to think what Aamir sounds like backwards. "How about Rimaa?" I proposed. "Arimaa?" he asked. Thinking that sounds even better, I replied, "Yea, that sounds good, we'll call it Arimaa." (pronounced Ah-REE-ma). So the first thing we did was pick a name for a game that didn't even exist. But that didn't bother us. The game would be ready by Monday and we had already picked the name. All we had to do now was figure out the rules.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 21st, 2010, 1:27pm by omar » |
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megajester
Forum Guru
Istanbul, Turkey
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Posts: 710
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Re: Hubpages review
« Reply #7 on: Oct 23rd, 2010, 11:23am » |
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Well, my experiences as a translator have led me to take a rather laissez faire approach to linguistic "correctness", based on consensus, ie. if everybody thinks it's correct it's correct. The concept of linguistic purity is a bit of a joke really in the grand scheme of things, especially in a language such as English, which, let's face it, is basically a Anglo-Saxon-French creole. All thoroughbreds are ultimately descended from a mongrel...
Anyway enough philosophy. What I'm trying to say is: Why does there need to be one correct pronounciation of Arimaa? The word is much too young and confined in it's usage to be able to say anything final on the matter. Meaning, let's say Arimaa makes it big and starts to get talked about on television, but always gets pronounced "aree-MAA". In that case the consensus will suddenly have shifted and permanently so; our insisting on "a-REE-mah" would prove rather Canute-ish.
All we can say about the present consensus is that there's a 50/50, or perhaps 60/40, split between "a-REE-mah" and "aree-MAA" (and of course that "a-ree-MAY-uh" is ridiculous). I say go with the flow, let people say it how they want to. Both are understandable.
Footnote: My mum worked as a CELTA teacher (teaching English to foreigners), and the policy she was encouraged to follow for British and American pronounciations was to accept both. They might prefer to teach one or the other, but they would only correct students if their pronounciation was wrong by both standards. Which I think was very reasonable.
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