How?
Kayshan?
Sayshan?
Kate-ian?
Sait-ian?
Sah-EE-shun?
Has it ever been spoken on screen?
Kayshan?
Sayshan?
Kate-ian?
Sait-ian?
Sah-EE-shun?
Has it ever been spoken on screen?
"Caitian" is pronounced...
- Thread starter Ensign Ogahd Ahmganadai
- Start date
Thanks!
It's never actually been spoken onscreen in a canonical work, so I guess we don't really know. But it seems logical to rhyme it with "Haitian." And of course it would be a hard C; as a rule, C in English is only soft (pronounced like S) before an E or I (e.g. Ceylon or Cincinnati).
I'd guess Kay-shan or Kay-shun first, but there's a case to be made for any of:
Kah-ee-shan
Kah-ee-shun
Kah-ee-she-an
Kah-ee-she-un
Kah-ee-see-an
Kah-ee-see-un
also.
Kah-ee-shan
Kah-ee-shun
Kah-ee-she-an
Kah-ee-she-un
Kah-ee-see-an
Kah-ee-see-un
also.
How do you pronounce Haitian, then? Or nation, or vacation, or carnation, or...
Normally it's pronounced either "Beetle-jooz" or "Bettle-jooz."
In Latin, maybe (though that's a Latinization of the Greek Ouranos), but the proper English pronunciation is the last one of those (despite the common tendency to mispronounce it as the second one).
How do you pronounce rough, bough, or through?
Still sounds like a 1980's movie ghost.
True, but that leaves you with a planet named either "Your Anus" or "Urine Us." Thus my preference for oo-rah-noos.
That's how I remember it being pronounced from the old Power Records "Passage to Moauv."
Other way around -- the movie character was named after the star. As we saw onscreen, his name was actually spelled Betelgeuse. They fudged the pronunciation of the final consonant to make it sound like "Beetlejuice."
I always say "brahk-ee-oh-sawr-us".
However Shatner says it.
My pet coelocanth, Caesar, would disagree with that rule.
The idea that English can have hard and fast rules is a facade.
I've always gone for Kate-ian.
Actually both those words are following a rule, specifically the established rules for the English pronunciation of Latin words. Under those rules, C and G before a digraph such as AE or OE are always soft, the way they would be before just E. After all, those are both pronounced as a single vowel rather than a diphthong, and English spelling reforms often reduced both of them to just E, as in "oestrogen" becoming "estrogen" or "encyclopaedia" becoming "encyclopedia." So their phonetic value is that of E by itself.
But that rule wouldn't apply to a word beginning with "cai-." There, the rule is quite consistent: caiman, Caine, cairn, caisson, Medicaid, always a hard C. There's even such a word as caitiff, an archaic word meaning a prisoner or a base, despicable person, which is pronounced "kate-iff." Yes, there can be occasional exceptions that don't follow any rule, but since this is an imaginary word whose pronunciation we're trying to deduce, that's where the rules are useful for figuring out the most likely pronunciation. Exceptions are, by definition, unlikely.
Plus, of course, there's the obvious fact that the name "Cait" was meant to evoke "cat." So of course it starts with a hard C.
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