Much of FFX's setting is based on Okinawa, and in the Okinawan dialect, Tidus is read "Tida." It doesn't make any less sense than, say, French. I certainly don't call him "Tida," myself, though.Originally Posted by RedCydranth
Much of FFX's setting is based on Okinawa, and in the Okinawan dialect, Tidus is read "Tida." It doesn't make any less sense than, say, French. I certainly don't call him "Tida," myself, though.
i come from a land that says missouri and tomate about 50 different ways; i can pronounce "cid" however the hell i want too
I don't pronounce Tidus in the english way, but with a long i.
And I don't really know about the Cid-thing, Final Fantasy names can be pronounced differently.
Like, in FFVIII [it's the best one, no matter what someone said], I don't pronounce Matron like it's supposed to in English, but [matroon]. For some reason.
Ok ive wondered this one for a while now: How do you properly pronounce SEIFER. For some reason ive always pronounced him as Cypher (like the dude from the Matrix)....but I know this isnt right (or at least i think it isnt) and the spelling looks like its probably like Sephiroth- Sefer or even Seefer (the extra E works in the I sound): what do you think?
I always prounced it "Seff-er" like the first half of Sephiroth.
Seifer and Sephiroth actually have the same hebrew root word (believe it or not the word is sephiroth...), meaning numbers. Its the root of the english Cypher, which gradually developed the meaning of "having no influence or value." As Seifer was a pawn, it makes sense. For sephiroth, some people think it refers to the little numbered clones running around. Anyway... Just thought I'd drop that tidbit. If you want more name origins, go here.
http://www.ffcompendium.com/h/nchara.shtml#8
YOU SPOONY BARD!!!!
Seizure is pronounced Seezher, so Seifer is Seefer
Sei is pronounced See.
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Current RPGs: Final Fantasy XII
*Points to the website*
YOU SPOONY BARD!!!!
Yeah i can see how that works and i do believe it is the right way of pronouncing it, but then theres Steiner. I know theres a T but it should still have the same sound, but no. It St-eye-ner. Thats probably another reason why i call Seifer S-eye-fer.
Guys, we're talking about PROPER pronunciation, not whether or not you're allowed to say things however you want.
If we're speaking cannonically in terms of what the english games have actually given us to work with, there's very little, but Cid in FFX is clearly pronounced as the name is said in English. Similarly, Tidus's name has been sounded out in Kingdom Hearts as "Tee-dus". You're allowed to pronounce "Moogle" like "fruity pebbles" if you want, but that won't make it correct.
Things change if we're using the etymological roots. At that point Cid definitely becomes "Seed", or "Theed" if you WANT to use the Castillian accent, but the majority of Spanish speaking people in the world don't have that accent, and at the time story was written I have no idea if the Castillian accent was in use.... Things get infinitely MORE confusing when you consider that El Cid is actually an Arabic story, the title of which I have never seen spelled but I have heard it pronounced "Al Sayeed". @.@
The only way to really know how these names are meant to be pronounced is to look at the Japanese spelling of them and the English translitteration. Japanese letters can only be pronounced one way (which is based on the regional dialect of course), but in English you change the pronunciation based on the word. Many words used as names in FF do not exist in English, so the name "Seifer" just gets pronounced arbitrarily. In order to figure out how it was intended to be pronounced, just look at the way it was written in Japanese. I don't have the Japanese game or any official books on the game in ANY language, so I can only echo what I've heard, which may or may not be correct. I have read that it is pronounced "Cypher", which makes sense if it's meant to be Germanic, since "ei" in German is pronounced the way we would say "eye".
As long as we have only 26 letters to cover the 40 or so phonemes (pronounced sounds), we'll have some abiguity in pronunciation. Certainly there are rules, but there are also variations based on dialect and exceptions (Ex: Polish and polish are spelled the same but pronounced differently). And as DJZen pointed out, pronunciation evolves over time.
Personally I wish the game creators could contact the English translators and inform them the sources of the names. That would have avoided some of the worse errors in translation.
This is how I pronounce all of the names mentioned. They may not be right, but I am entitled to interpret the written word as I please. So I have.
Cid = Sid
Tifa = Tee-fah
Tidus = Tye-dus
Sephiroth = Seff-ih-roth
Seifer = Sy-fer
Aeris = Air-rees
This is where all of you get confused. Cid, Seifer, Tidus etc... are all names translated from Japanese to english. So, if this sentence "It was a dark lonesome road" was in a FF and translated from japanes to english, would you still say it in japanese? Nope. In spanish? Nope. German? Nope. Why? because its written there in english. I don't care what entymological roots it has, nor if the word originated in Uzbekistan. The fact that its written in english with everything else in english means you pronounce it as english.
Cid is Sid
Tidus is Ty-dus
Seifer is See-fur
That is how the english language pronounces these words and that is how I pronounce them. The only one with arguable pronunciation is Tidus which in KH is pronounced Tee-dus. But everyone I know pronounces it Ty-dus, and they all agree Tee-dus makes him sound stupid.
Slade (cool name BTW. Slade is a ninja in one of my favorite games, Shining Force 2) you already made my point. S followed by an ei makes an "ee" sound, Place another consonant and it changes everything. You are right, it SHOULD give the same sound. But the fact is that it doesn't.
Steiner is actually an anomoly. In no onther word besides stein does an ei follow an st. look at these words. Sheik (sheek), Skein (skeen), protein (proteen). ei in english is most commonly "ee" ONLY in stein is it "eye".
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Current RPGs: Final Fantasy XII
i'm just goin to pronounce the names the way they are in the English version since i live in America.
hmmm...something that no one else said anything about. Aerith sounding like a lisp? It's Latin, and in Latin, "th" is pronounced "sss."
Like a backwards lisp or something. For example, listen to One Winged Angel. The chorus is singing it like "Sephiross" I still use the "th" pronounciation in Sephiroth though. I like it.
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