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[AdamH]

Pronunciations:

Maybe it's a good idea for us to have a resource for how to pronounce each of the card names. I played some games recently where people pronounced things strangely -- some I was OK with, but the one that gets me every time is Golem.

People always say it like the Lord of the Rings character Gollum, like "GAH-lum" where I've only known the correct way to say the word to be "GOAL-um" or maybe "GO-lum". It hits the same chord with me as when people call a clownfish a "Nemo fish."

Anyways, I know most of them are trivial, like Feast. But several are rather unique words that I certainly didn't know before Dominion. I'll list a few here, and maybe if it's a good idea we could compile a list of all cards and their pronunciations (or at least all the weird ones).

Golem -- "GOAL-um" or "GO-lum" . NOT LotR Character Gollum, "GAH-lum"

Mountebank -- is it "MOUNT-uh-bank" or "MONT-uh-bank" or "MONT-uh-bonk"?

Feodum -- Was it "FEE-uh-dum" or "FAY-uh-dum" or "FAY-oh-dum"? [after scouring F.DS for the answer, I think the second option was mentioned to be correct?]

Hovel -- "HUH-vill" or "HAH-vill" or maybe "ho-VELL"? [Google gives me either of the first two as being correct]

Wharf -- "Worf" or "Hworf"?

I always enjoy saying Duchy like "Dukey", and when Dukes are in the game I say them exactly the same way for maximum confusion, and more opportunities to tell someone they're "taking a dukey." Go ahead, judge me on my maturity, I deserve it.

Plurals:

I realize Isotropic is a wonderful resource for this, but it won't be around forever, and even though I haven't looked very hard for it, I haven't seen any plural card names on the Goko version. Also, if there are weird pronunciation issues with the regular names, maybe there are for the plurals as well: Oases - comes to mind, "oh-AY-sees"

Feoda - soo... how do we pronounce this? "FAY-uh-duh"? That doesn't seem right...
Feodums - "FAY-uh-dums"

Fool's Golds

Singular card names that are plural: Nobles, Gardens, Smugglers, Rats, Spoils, Survivors, Ruins, Ironworks or Goons - umm, what do we do here? (Nobleses, Gardenses, Smugglerses, Ratses, Spoilses, Survivorses, Ruinses, Ironworkses, Goonses) and/or (Nobles, Gardens, Smugglers, Rats, Spoils, Survivors, Ruins, Ironworks, Goons)?

[Kirian]

According to Wiki, so take with a grain of salt, the Hebrew pronunciation is GOH-lem, rhymes with "Roll 'Em."  They invented the concept, so I'd go with that.

Hovel:  I've always heard the first, the second is probably common in Northeastern US dialects, and possibly Brit English.

Wharf is only pronounced "Hwarf" if you want to sound obnoxious or like Stewie Griffin.

[AJD]

Pronunciations:
some I was OK with, but the one that gets me every time is Golem.

People always say it like the Lord of the Rings character Gollum, like "GAH-lum" where I've only known the correct way to say the word to be "GOAL-um" or maybe "GO-lum".

Thank you; this drives me up the wall. I suspect this is people not realizing that "golem" and "Gollum" are two different words (and probably unrelated—but I have no specific evidence for whether or not Tolkien was influenced by "golem" in making up the name "Gollum").

Feodum -- Was it "FEE-uh-dum" or "FAY-uh-dum" or "FAY-oh-dum"? [after scouring F.DS for the answer, I think the second option was mentioned to be correct?]

Since this one isn't an English word, it's hard to say...

[AdamH]

Wharf is only pronounced "Hwarf" if you want to sound obnoxious or like Stewie Griffin.

Stewie Griffin is what I was going for. That was the "joking" paragraph, as was denoted by the toungey-face and the proximity to dukey-talk.

Coalition against people saying Gollum while I'm playing Dominion!

[AJD]

Hovel:  I've always heard the first, the second is probably common in Northeastern US dialects, and possibly Brit English.

<a href="http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~dinkin/">As a sociolinguist</a>, I'm interested in why you have this impression. Why those dialects in particular? (OED gives both pronunciations equal status, as do the American Heritage Dictionary and Merriam-Webster.)

Wharf is only pronounced "Hwarf" if you want to sound obnoxious or like Stewie Griffin.

...Or, you know, if you're one of the millions of other English speakers who distinguish between witch and weather on the one hand and which and whether on the other.

[HiveMindEmulator]

Wharf is only pronounced "Hwarf" if you want to sound obnoxious or like Stewie Griffin.

...Or, you know, if you're one of the millions of other English speakers who distinguish between witch and weather on the one hand and which and whether on the other.

Usually context should be sufficient to tell witch of these you intend to say, regardless of weather or not you pronounce the "h".

[eHalcyon]

...Or, you know, if you're one of the millions of other English speakers who distinguish between witch and weather on the one hand and which and whether on the other.

What's wrong with having a few homophones?

[werothegreat]

I say DOOK-ee.  Always have, always will.  I mean, a DOOK-ee is run by a DOOK, so why would I call it a DUTCH-ee?  I don't call it a KONG-dom. 

[Kirian]

Hovel:  I've always heard the first, the second is probably common in Northeastern US dialects, and possibly Brit English.

<a href="http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~dinkin/">As a sociolinguist</a>, I'm interested in why you have this impression. Why those dialects in particular? (OED gives both pronunciations equal status, as do the American Heritage Dictionary and Merriam-Webster.)

That longer "ah" tends to creep into words in Boston, NY, and Maine accents in places that use the schwa or a shorter "a."  Less true for British English, I suspect, but the various British dialects have much more in common with the New England area than the rest of the US.

Wharf is only pronounced "Hwarf" if you want to sound obnoxious or like Stewie Griffin.

...Or, you know, if you're one of the millions of other English speakers who distinguish between witch and weather on the one hand and which and whether on the other.

I have never heard anyone do this.  According to Wiki (again with a grain of salt, but they cite Labov), this is basically confined to Scotland, Ireland, and parts of the Southeast US (which retain some other characteristics of the Scottish dialect.)  Everyone else doing it is doing so to sound pretentious.

[Archetype]

what about Laboratory?

I pronounce it La-BOR-ah-TOR-ee because it's fun to say

[shMerker]

Coalition against people saying Gollum while I'm playing Dominion!

I say it whenever I decide to break PPR to because I still only have two provinces.

[Razzishi]

Since feodum is not an English word you should follow the rules for Latin, which says the stress on feodum falls on the first syllable (Wikitionary says the 'o' is not long, so the stress does not fall there).  The pronunciation of 'e' is a "long A" as in IPA /e/, but not diphthonged into /ei/ as is common in many dialects (users of such dialects generally don't even realize there is a separate vowel sound for the first half is their long A, and use the diphthonged version in foreign words when just the first half should be used). 

Mountebank comes from Italian monta-in-banco "mount a bench", which is what mountebanks did to hawk their wares apparently.  The Italians would say "mont" but in English it would be "mount".  The 'a' should be the same as you use in "bank", which depends on dialect.

[dondon151]

*Pronunciations

[DsnowMan]

I want to pretend Mountebank is french, so we say "MONT-uh-banc", which is really close to "MONT-uh-bonk"

[AJD]

...Or, you know, if you're one of the millions of other English speakers who distinguish between witch and weather on the one hand and which and whether on the other.

What's wrong with having a few homophones?

Nothing, of course. But if two words aren't homophones, shouldn't someone want to know which is witch?

[AJD]

I mean, a DOOK-ee is run by a DOOK, so why would I call it a DUTCH-ee?

Actual answer: because in Old French, k turned into ch when followed by a.

[mameluke]

Wow, more Dominion-playing linguists? Count me in.

As far as [hw] goes, I've heard it among some speakers in the southwest--perhaps due to influence from Spanish which has [hw] in words like juez, but it could also just be a phenomenon from older speakers of English.

[RiemannZetaJones]

I have never heard anyone do this.  According to Wiki (again with a grain of salt, but they cite Labov), this is basically confined to Scotland, Ireland, and parts of the Southeast US (which retain some other characteristics of the Scottish dialect.)  Everyone else doing it is doing so to sound pretentious.

That's at least 10 million people.

[AJD]

Hovel:  I've always heard the first, the second is probably common in Northeastern US dialects, and possibly Brit English.

<a href="http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~dinkin/">As a sociolinguist</a>, I'm interested in why you have this impression. Why those dialects in particular? (OED gives both pronunciations equal status, as do the American Heritage Dictionary and Merriam-Webster.)

That longer "ah" tends to creep into words in Boston, NY, and Maine accents in places that use the schwa or a shorter "a."  Less true for British English, I suspect, but the various British dialects have much more in common with the New England area than the rest of the US.

Hmm, interesting. So yeah, what's going on here is a fact that Labov's occasionally observed—namely, stereotypes get attached to particular vowel sounds, not to the specific distribution of them or the set of words that contain them. So the ah-type vowel is in fact associated with the Boston and standard British accents in words like aunt, half, ask, and so on—this has nothing to do with hovel, since the words that exceptionally have ah in Boston have the "trap" vowel in other dialects, not the "strut" vowel. But the stereotype doesn't get attached to "Bostonians use the ah vowel instead of the 'trap' vowel"—the stereotype is just "Bostonians use the ah vowel a lot," so when you're considering an alternation between ah and a completely different vowel, you still associate ah with Boston. This is legitimately really fascinating.

Actually this is slightly more complicated, since in the Boston accent and standard British English, ah isn't the same as the short-o-as-in-stop vowel; and the pronunciation at issue involves the "stop" vowel, not ah. So even Boston-accented people who do use the pronunciation of hovel at issue don't use the ah vowel in it. Which isn't relevant for explaining the reasoning above.

Wharf is only pronounced "Hwarf" if you want to sound obnoxious or like Stewie Griffin.

...Or, you know, if you're one of the millions of other English speakers who distinguish between witch and weather on the one hand and which and whether on the other.

I have never heard anyone do this.  According to Wiki (again with a grain of salt, but they cite Labov), this is basically confined to Scotland, Ireland, and parts of the Southeast US (which retain some other characteristics of the Scottish dialect.)

...That's millions.

Anyhow, that's a bit of an exaggeration—the which-witch distinction isn't confined to the South in the US, though it's certainly most frequent there (and even that's not saying much). It still turns up sporadically in other parts of the country; I have two close friends, both under the age of 35, who make the which-witch distinction natively, and they're from New Jersey (though with one parent from the South) and Michigan.

Everyone else doing it is doing so to sound pretentious.

Nobody tries to sound pretentious. Lots of people try for something else and land on pretentious, though.

[Qvist]

One thing I always ask myself. What is the plural of Fool's Gold? Fool's Golds sounds strange...
And how do people call multiple cards of a card which has a plural in name like Nobles, Gardens, Smugglers, Rats, Spoils, Survivors or Goons? Does it stay the same or is it best to say "Nobles cards" or "Gardens cards"?
Not that it matters often, but what is the plural of Necropolis?

BTW: Plural of Feodum is Feoda.

[kn1tt3r]

What is the plural of Fool's Gold? Fool's Gplds sounds strange...

It really does...

[Qvist]

Oh sorry. Corrected

[Davio]

One thing I always ask myself. What is the plural of Fool's Gold? Fool's Golds sounds strange...
And how do people call multiple cards of a card which has a plural in name like Nobles, Gardens, Smugglers, Rats, Spoils, Survivors or Goons? Does it stay the same or is it best to say "Nobles cards" or "Gardens cards"?
Not that it matters often, but what is the plural of Necropolis?

BTW: Plural of Feodum is Feoda.

Those ones are easy.

It's obviously Nobility, Park, Ring, Plague, War Treasury, Lost and Mafia.

[Asklepios]

Just to clarify, how do you pronounce Mountebank? I never saw the word before Dominion, and our play group has been saying "mount'i'bank".

I'm expectign we're wrong. We played the Mage: the Ascension rpg for about five years before a new player pointed out we were saying Arete wrong. (we were saying areet, rather than airt-ay, which was kind of embarassing)

[PitzerMike]

I say DOOK-ee.  Always have, always will.  I mean, a DOOK-ee is run by a DOOK, so why would I call it a DUTCH-ee?  I don't call it a KONG-dom.

Well, duchy is fine if you can imagine a duchy being run by a douche.