Monday, July 31, 2006

Pronunciation of Pagan Names and Terms?

When you started out, did anyone else here want to bang their head against the walls over how to pronounce things correctly? Every website I look up has the same thing going on, no one knows how to say gods' names that are Celtic ... because none of us are Celtic.

Take Cernunnos. Is that Cer-noon-us? os? He's supposed to be Celtic, but some of these sites say the name is still Latin, because the Celts didn't have a written language {wouldn't they still have spoken his name out loud?}. But even with it being Latin, it's still a hard C. I think.
Cerridwen? Cer-a-win?

No one wants to pronounce a god's name wrong ... seems in bad form. How does one pronounce Ganesha? Gan-esha? Or Sekhmet? I can watch Stargate SG1 all day and they won't pronounce any of the hard Egyptian gods' names.

I think the Greek and Roman gods are so common to us, because of movies and books, that we know how to pronounce them. But toss in Celtic or Egyptian or Hindu and some of us are clueless.

So is there a good source for how to pronounce these names? or even Sabbat names. I think Lughnassad is Loo-nus-ah. But how does one say Lammas if that's too long? Hehe. I know I sound really stupid, but this just isn't a strong point for me. I don't want to say the words wrong. My husband is asking me alot of questions here lately ... I hate not being able to answer them.

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