Project Lore

What does pronunciation have to do with a fond memory, let alone World of Warcraft?  Allow me to paint you a (paint by numbers) picture.  I was cleaning out my bookmarks a few weeks ago and I came across a thread I saved from 2005 entitled "How do you pronounce Scholomance?"  Filled with glee and excitement, I clicked on the link to relive the joy that 2005 had brought me, but it was all for naught thanks to Blizzard and the forum pruning.  Dejected but not broken, I tried a quick Google search and came across an archived version of the thread.  It is difficult to read and it repeats itself for some reason, but now-retired CM Caydiem, and the other forum goers, deliver a bunch of win in the thread. I must hand it to the original poster though, that was a brave question to ask more than six months after the title was released.  It was also a good one.  Seeing as the game and its locations are largely made up via the MMORPG's various racial dialects, it can be quite difficult to discern the correct pronunciation.  As the thread points out, sometimes Blizzard doesn't even know the "correct" phonetics to the words.  There are a ton of phrases from World of Warcraft that I have heard mispronounced in various way.  I'll admit that I just recently learned the correct pronunciation of Ulduar (Ull-doo-ar).  Reaching further back there are common mistakes with the Draenei (DRAN-eye), their buddies the Naaru (na-ru), TBC's main city Shattrath, C'Thun (Kah-Thoon) and everyone's favorite goblin town of Gadgetzan (Gadget-zan).  I was off on only two of those, drain-y and ul-der. I honestly don't know the official pronunciation of Shattrath City.  Personally, I have always said Shatt-wrath, but find a silent th, Shatt-ra, to be acceptable as well due to the draenei roots.  You'd think that I would have learned from my guild's ventrilo, but how often do people say the whole location, rather than Shat?  Perhaps my guildmates don't know the intended sound of the city either... What commonly used locations and words do you hear murdered during your travels?  At the same time, please state the perceived correct way to say the words in question.  The thing that makes me chuckle the most is that English words like melee and buffet are botched to this day! As for spelling misteakes, that is an entirely different discussion.  All this talk of steaks and smorgasbords is making me hungry.

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