Though I don't understand your frustration.



I'd pronounce it "Zill okay good luck pronouncing this fucking words let pkay".

Seriously though, the only complexity in Tel'aran'rhiod comes from the apostrophes and the 'rh' sound. It's exceedingly basic consonnant-vowel progression, it's got no sounds that are unusual or alien to the English language, and as guttering flame pointed out, it's not even especially long. Thus far I've already used 'pronouncing', 'apostrophes', 'exceedingly' and 'progression' in this post, and they're all eleven letter words as well. Forget 'peculiarities'.

Maybe I just don't have the same perspective as you do, because I'm surrounded by french people who can't pronounce 'the' because the 'th' sound does not exist in the language (not to mention that it can be pronounced differently depending on the word). I've been working to pronounce rolling 'r's or the 'ch' sound that is used in german for some songs too. But "Tel'aran'rhiod'... could you be more specific? What is it about the word that causes you difficulty?

Since you brought the subject up though, I'm going to bring up a few amusing incidents I noticed in my language. Here's a common french word you might like: oiseau. It's the word for "bird", is six letters long and contains all five vowels. Not hard to pronounce at all, once you know how (wazo), but it looks really weird.

Or here's something that I noticed when I was in my last year of elementary school. For whatever reason during this phase of my childhood, I'd decided that writing meant using letters only, so I would spell out every number. This was when I realised that french numbers are weird (weird is also a word that took me a long time to learn, I kept writing it wierd). The year was 1998, or as I wrote it, "Mille neuf cent quatre-vingt-dix-huit" Forget about when you need to use hyphens and when you need to pluralise the numbers (neuf cents vs. neuf cent un) and just concentrate on the fact that this would word by word translate to "Thousand nine hundred four-twenty-ten-eight".

This is because, as in many other languages, french decide to name its multiples of ten up to a hundred rather than simply going for the multipliers of "one ten", "two ten", "three ten" and so forth that we employ for hundreds, thousands and other units, but after "sixty", for some reason we decided to stop using new words (even though they exist - septante, octante/huitante, nonante) and decided to first continue counting the ones up to nineteen - thus "sixty-nine" goes to "sixty-ten", "sixty-eleven", "sixty-twelve" and so forth, and then for "eighty" we decided that instead of multiplying eight by ten, it'd be a much better idea to multiply four by twenty. Thus, "seventy-nine" (or sixty-nineteen, if you've been following) is followed by "four-twenty", "four-twenty-one" and so on. And again, non "ninety", we just keep adding to the ones until we get to a hundred. Thus in the year I mentioned, instead of having "ninety-eight" we get "four-twenty-eighteen" or "four twenty-ten-eight" because we also grew bored of finding new names for numbers after sixteen.

Language makes no sense at all.