Queen's Thief pronunciation guide

this is an audio version of this entire post in one file:

hello! This is a pronunciation guide for the Queen’s Thief book series, written by Megan Whalen Turner! It’s a pretty small fandom (I think it only graduated out of Yuletide eligibility last year) but a persistent one, and like some other SFF book series fandoms, perhaps disproportionately popular among podficcers. HOWEVER, there’s no pronunciation guide I can find. There ARE audiobooks, but that’s a pain in the ass to look through when you just need to know how to say some names for a podfic you are impulsively recording. As a completely hypothetical situation. That I have certainly never encountered.

Now, a note from me. [as i flourish my hands around to pull out a soapbox and stand on it] I have followed the pronunciations in the audiobooks for this guide, because that’s the source we have, and it’s presumably consistent with how some other people in fandom would be pronouncing these words and what they’d expect to hear. But I do have beef with the pronunciations, and this seems like a good place to air that particular beef. We all know that the setting of these books is fantasy Greece. Many of these names literally are or sound very much like Greek names and words. But let me tell you: I’m extremely new to learning Greek, like the most baby of beginners, and yet I feel pretty damn confident that there is very little Greek in any of this pronunciation. Obviously modern Greek is not ancient Greek, and like many other ancient versions of languages, there are debates about how it was pronounced, and I’m sure there are arguments to be made. But this is clearly being pronounced the way English says Greek names and words, and I hate it. Ειρήνη is a perfectly good Greek name! I don’t think the STRESS of Ambiades is even right, let alone the VOWELS!! And, okay, to be fair, some of this is the author’s usage of Greek and Latin style names next to each other (Relius and Teleus come to mind), but I’m just saying. If we take both into account, we also have to accept the crime against Latin that is the pronunciation of Sejanus!! So, if anyone wants to completely disregard all of my pronunciations in this post in favor of what would make sense for Greek, that would be a delight to me. [and then i climb back off of my soapbox]

The names and words in this are arranged alphabetically and descriptions are taken mostly from the character list at the end of Return of the Thief and the character list on the Queen’s Thief fandom wiki. So, BEWARE SPOILERS!!! Mostly for the early books, but if you know this fandom, you know how it goes, so, consider yourself warned.

( Word list and individual audio clips )