On Kaladesh and pronounciations

Hi friends,

A lot of requests have come in asking me to share how to pronounce a few of the words and names in Kaladesh, so I thought I’d do that this week to help prepare for the prerelease weekend. If i have time, i might even record a video! For now though, what follows is an introduction to how Indian languages work, and then a guide to pronouncing the handful of words in Kaladesh that are indic descended. For the safety and security of your browsing experience, I’ve included a cut.



First, though, a brief introduction to the Sanskrit descended family of languages, which encompass most of the northern part of India, including languages like Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati and so on. South Indian languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada etc are part of the Dravidian family of languages, and work entirely differently. Most of the names in this set are Northie in origin, so that’s what I’m gonna focus on.

The most important thing to know for the purposes of pronounciation is that Sanskrit and its daughter languages are what linguists call “abugidas”. This means that each letter, as it were, is a combination of a consonant sound and a default vowel sound. Let me explain.

When i show you K, if you speak a language that uses the latin alphabet, you’ll see the letter K, pronounced in english as “Kay”. However, the sound the letter makes is independent of the name of the letter, mostly, and depends on the vowel that follows it. If you just try to read that letter K independently, you get something like a forced puff of air traveling over your tongue without making your vocal cords move. But once you tack on a vowel letter to it, like A, you get KA, which is suddenly a recognizable phoneme with meaning, very nearly a word!

The point is, in alphabetic writing systems, Consonants and Vowels have equal weight as independent letters, and are joined together to make words. In Abugidas, every consonant has an inherent vowel, and if further vowels are needed, they are added in the form of accent marks and diacritics around the consonant character.



To explain, let’s go back to that K sound above. In Hindi (and other languages that use the Devanagari writing systems), the K sound is made with the following character - क

Actually, let’s make it bigger so you can see.

There. That’s better. This is the first character in the writing system, Ka. it’s not just the voiceless velar K sound we discussed above, it’s an entire sound unit, a phoneme, by itself. It’s pronounced [kə], if you can read the International Phonetic Alphabet. If you can’t, it’s basically “Kuh”. that upside down e you see? it’s a symbol called a schwa, which is basically the most neutral sound you can make. just open your mouth and say uh, and you’re there.

So here’s the trick- every consonant in north indian languages (let’s just say hindi for short here, and i’ll point out if its a different case elsewhere as needed) has that uh sound attached by default. So it’s not B, D, L, J, it’s Buh, Duh, Luh, Juh.

And where the issue for most folks come from is that when we write out Hindi into english, we can’t just have K,or Kuh. We write out Ka.



The problem is that most English speakers, when confronted with Ka, don’t want to say it like the first syllable in cultivate, they’d rather say it like the last syllable in the music genre Ska. This, sadly, is wrong, because that ka, in Ska or Carnival, is actually का, or the Ka with the long A vowel marker appended to it.

As you can see in the chart, whenever we add a vowel to the Ka character, we add a different diacritic marker. You can see that क and का are different sounds entirely. The first is Kuh, the second Kaa.



Sadly, the trouble starts in translation. The folks who brought Indian languages to European nations were sloppy and kinda lazy, and ignored things like “inherent schwa vowel sounds”, leading to both क and का to be transliterated as “Ka”.

In a set called Kaladesh, you can see how this might pose a problem! Almost all of the indic words WotC used in naming the set were made up, except for a few proper names. And they were fast and loose when it came to figuring out how vowels were supposed to work, leaving us to work backwards from the English with the rules of how North Indian languages generally work to understand how to pronounce these.

Yes, I could just cheat and use the Japanese cards and read the katakana to see exactly how one branch of WotC expected us to say them, but where’s the fun in that?

So lets start with the big one first, the name of the set itself.







Kaladesh. Luckily we’ve heard WotC say this numerous times, so we know it’s supposed to be कालादेश, or Kah-Lah-Desh. Ka and La rhyme with the vowel in Car or Star. Desh is a little more complex. It rhymes with the english word mesh, but the d in front is more like the initial sound in they. You have to move your tongue up to behind your teeth and push off. Higher than you would when you say “the”.

The meaning of the word? Well, they picked it cause it sounds nice, so let’s move on.



No?

sigh. Ok,



It breaks into two words. Kala, and Desh. Kala, depending on your reading, either means “Tomorrow/Yesterday” (yes, the words are the same, reincarnation and the eternal cycle of death and rebirth and the never ending universe etc etc- we use verb endings and context to figure it out), or “Black”.

Desh means nation/place. So yeah, if you’re being charitable, it could be Tomorrow Nation/Place, or it could be Black Country. Yes, we’d all love it to be the former, but when you say Kala like that, the final schwa sound is dropped, leaving “Kal”, which is not how wotc pronounces it. So Black country it is. Anyway, let’s move on to the twelve cards that need help with pronouncing, shall we?







Aah-ruh-Dah-ruh Express. Not a word with meaning, but just following common grammatic consistency gets us to आरदार, which means long a, schwa, long a, schwa. In most modern languages, the final a can be dropped off if it represent a schwa sound, so this could also just be pronounced Aaradaar Express. (This is why we pronounce Arjuna as Arjun, or Rama as Ram. the last sound is voiceless and gets dropped, unless you’re in South India)



Kumbul. Schwas all the way around. Interestingly, his name would probably be written out कंबल, with the am as the dot diacritic mark above the ka. In english, his name rhymes with rumble.



Rhymes with Farm bum. or Firm bum, depending on how they wanted us to say it. TBH, i just like this picture a lot =)



This is a tricky one, because the first assuption is to pronounce all the syllables equally as Oh-Vee-Ya. But if she lived in my neighborhood in Vadodara? I’d be yelling out OHvya Auntie as she walked by. Emphasis on the first syllable, slur the last two. OHV rhyming with Grove, ya rhyming with ska.



Last name? PAA-shee-ri. Rhymes with Saheeli.



Oof, two toughies in a row. there are two ways to go here. One, you say all three syllables, in which case it’s Pruh-KHAA-tuh. schwa, long a, schwa, emphasis on the middle syllable.

But the thing is, if i just read this without making assumptions, i’d read it as Prakh-taa. Prakh rhyming with Truck, taa rhyming with ska, emphasis on first syllable. Kh is an aspirated ka, where you end with a puff of air, like you said Park with emphasis. Here, try a quick exercise to see if you’re aspirating or not.

Put your hand in front of your face. Now say the word “skill”. you should not feel a puff of air on your hand as you say that. That’s an unaspirated ka that we’ve been using everywhere so far.



Now, still holding your hand in front of your face, say “Kill”. you should feel the puff of air brushing your palm. That’s the Kh sound we’re working with here.



This is why it’s easier to say Prakh-taa. The aspirated kh is an easy hard stop for your voice.



Hey look, we can put that training in aspirates to work! Dukh means ‘pain’ or ‘suffering’, depending on where you look, which fits here. So this one is pronounced dookhaaraa. Emphasis on middle syllable, rhymes with “spook car, aa!” (as if you were playing an innistrad/kaladesh chaos draft or something)



Rush-me. Real name, everyone has as Rashmi aunty. Rhymes with Brush-free.



I know, you want to say Bandar like Land Car, but nope, it’s a real word that means monkey. Bundur. Rhymes with Under.



This is strange, because you’d think her name would be Deepala, which is a real name, but no, depala it is. This is duh-paa-laa. Rhymes with Nepal.



Like the vowel in Munda from BFZ.or the word Full.



The Dh in the front should pass the puff test above. Dhund, rhymes with the german Bund.



Janjeet, a legitimate Punjabi name! Jun-jeet. Schwa sound. rhymes with Run, Pete.



And now the big one, the one who has been mispronounced so long the ship has well and sailed. Chandra Nalaar, named for the Moon.

चन्द्र नलार



Chandra should be both schwa sounds. Chun-druh. Like Chun Li and Drum.

but no, she’s basically Shondra forever, and fighting that is futility itself, but for those interested, there ya go.



—

Anyway! There’s your guide to pronouncing the handful of Indic names in Kaladesh. I hope you guys have a ton of fun at the prerelease, and be sure to show off your newfound education to all your friends =)

