Hey y’all. I wanted a new name here for various reasons, and TubaDiva just made the switch for me. No discontinuity with previous comments is intended.
Cool name. So is it pronounced para-MEN-so?
Sure, something like that. It’s a transcription from an imaginary, unwritten language, so I reckon it’s spelled how it sounds and vice-versa.
Please clear up confusion of my personal brain bias.
spark240 = male
Peremensoe = female
So which is it?
Am I insane (maybe), but I thought it was spark420, not spark240?
Joe
It’s Peremensoe, not Premenstrual.
I’m male.
“Pere” (father) + “mens” + “oe” (masculine name ending) seems pretty male-oriented. In the story, it refers to the body of philosophical knowledge of the “Old Men” of the culture.
No. At least a couple people read it that way and thought it was a pot-smoking reference–“spark up the 420”–but it was never meant that way. Not that I object to people sparking up.
How it sounds in the imaginary unwritten language, or how it sounds in English? I guess you mean that if the imaginary language used the English alphabet and its spelling/pronunciation rules, that’s the way you would spell it in English. Except that English doesn’t have any pronunciation rules, because as we all know fish and ghoti are pronounced the same. Now I’ve hopelessly confused myself.
Yes, exactly.
Now if we could just get the other “spark” wannabes new names…
What imaginary language is it from, and where is that language from?
Did you make it up yourself, the language?
It’s from “The Pathways of Desire,” a 1979 short story by the great Ursula K. Le Guin. The language is a key element of the story, but only a handful of words actually appear. (To say more would be a spoiler.)
I use it here for its specific meaning within that story, and as general tribute to Le Guin.
Oh frabjous day, brother! Welcome to the club of Posters who have usernames that are impossible to pronounce with any confidence! Umm, we are working on making the club name a bit shorter. Help yourself to pie in the back.
It’s pronounced “chruck”. Or maybe “IN-sur-ance.”
Anyway, welcome back. Or something.
And to be consistent, more ambiguous and difficult to correctly pronounce.
My mind sees it as Persephone, which is a little jarring.
English does not lack pronunciation rules. English has, rather, very complicated pronunciation rules. One of them is that that the phoneme /f/ may be spelled f, ph, or gh, but the last is not permitted at the beginning of a word. Another is that the phoneme /ʃ/ may be spelled sh, ch, or ti, but the last is only permitted at the onset of a syllable, not as the coda.
I was going to use the [pedantic jackass] [/pedantic jackass] tags, but I got a new Literal Truth add-on in Firefox and the computer was forced to point out that my pedantic jackassery does not have an off switch.
Hence the female looking name.
Same for me. 