Dune and Pronunciation

When she gives you a Fremen son, you begin with him, Liet-Kynes, and the other children, teaching them ecological literacy, creating a new language with symbols that arm the mind to manipulate an entire landscape, its climate, seasonal limits, and finally to break through all ideas of force into dazzling awareness of order - Frank Herbert, Dune.

This sentence not only gives us a creepy feeling about Arrakian politics, it spells out the kind of grandiose ideas we can get about language particularly the ones we make up. Also it talks about symbols as enablers, opening new worlds for people, which can certainly be true. But familiar symbols can also lead us astray.

Frank Herbert put a lot of color into his novels through his technical terminology and naming and renaming of characters within the story. He gives us the feeling of having a lot of different languages operating just out of view. Yet on the surface everyone speaks the same general language. We have a system that produced terms like delightfully smooth Bene Gesserit and the delightfully awkard Kwisatz Haderach; and produced names like Atreides, which begs to be pronounced as if it were Greek, the Finnish looking Harkonnen, the blatantly Germanic term Landsraad and the Arabic-flavored Mu'ad Dib. Herbert even tells us about multiple Battle Languages in his appendix, although we never really get to hear one. Clearly the universe of Dune is a blend of cultures we (at least collectively) are somewhat familiar with.

In Dune, besides the common language, we also see bits and pieces of a constructed language that has a distinctly Slavic origin.

Ima trava okolo!
I korenja okolo!
Jessica translated silently: These are ashes! And these are roots!
(Those versed in Slavic will read the passage as 'There is 'grass' around, and roots around,' and not be much surprised by Jessica's/Herbert's version save the word 'ashes.')


One problem with mixing cultures like this is that pronouncing all the various names and terms becomes a difficult challenge for the reader. Herbert pretty much assumed we could figure it out for ourselves. I know from discussing the book in person with a variety of people that that didn't work out very well. Whether Herbert cared, I don't know.

The Sci-Fi Channel's 2000 version of Dune, used pronunciations that mostly agreed with my guesses, using 'continental' vowels and English consonants. I've always pronounced name of Paul's love interest, Chani, to rhyme with 'Johnny.' So did most of my acquaintances who came up with a variety of 'interesting' versions of Kwisatz Haderach. I think even the awful, gawdy De Lorentiis, 1984 movie verison called her that. But the 2000 mini-series decided it should be pronounced 'Chainy.' I don't know how Herbert wanted it pronounced, but 'Chainy' grated on me every time I heard it.

The first rule of orthography in language construction is that no matter what you do to make things easy to pronounce, someone will always mispronounce everything. It's something we have to live with. Not everyone knows what 'continental' vowels sound like and vowels in English, as we know, are pronounced in strange and mysterious ways.