How do you pronounce A-Ware?

Author:	Gregory P. Epley
Published:	09/03/2023
Rated:	PG (mild strong language)

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Some might say, okay, poh-tay-toh, poh-tah-toh … what does it matter? It’s the principle of the matter. Do you want to come off sounding “in the know” or like an ignorant fool who doesn’t care about their diction?

It is NOT, as one might assume, pronounced like the English word, “aware”, as in “to be aware of something”.

It also is NOT “A dash Ware” or “A hyphen Ware”.

No. Correct pronunciation is like the first letter in the English alphabet, followed by “wear”, as in, “to wear something”, or like the end of “hardware” or “software”. So, A, wear, but without much pause between the two sounds. It is deliberately intended to sound different from “aware”, in order to differentiate it, despite being related.

I get pronunciations wrong. Most everyone does from time to time. But I do also try to pin down correct pronunciation. Sometimes this is a matter of opinion, whereas, especially in the case of fictional elements, there is usually only one correct pronunciation. This latter is the case with A-Ware, as just one example. Execor is another, and Diuturnalyte is another. It’s all there in the novels, for your convenience.

In many cases, I created my own phonetic pronunciations, but as I am coming from the United States, my phonetic representations may not seem immediately obvious to English speakers outside the United States. Your guess on most sounds is probably correct. For example, I might write “fuh”, which would be the sound of the start of the English word, “funny”. My phonetic pronunciation would likely be, fuh-nee. In other cases, you will notice I use a tailing “h”, as in data, or day-tah, rather than day-ta. I do this to try to emphasize the “ah” sound.

This latter can be a very subtle thing. For example, some people pronounce data as day-tuh rather than day-tah. Again, perhaps this is poh-tay-toh, poh-tah-toh … but all I was attempting to do was offer pronunciations for those readers who might prefer having them. If this isn’t you, then just try to read past the pronunciations. I didn’t include pronunciations because I felt my readers were stupid, but rather to be informative.

I have, after all, read my share of alien science fiction or fantasy with a lot of words which were either made up or based on something some segments of society might be familiar with from one or more cultures, but which confuse the rest of us. A good example are the Frank Herbert “Dune” books. If one is familiar enough with the cultural references, one might be able to figure out pronunciations, but I see it as a mistake to assume one’s readers are all well read and well versed in most everything out there in the world. I am personally rather insulted by the author, whoever they might be, who doesn’t offer pronunciations. Better to have it and not need it, than to need it but not have it.

Sounding out unfamiliar words is NOT always the best approach, as one can too easily place emphasis in wrong places …resulting in one coming off sounding quite foolish. My phonetic pronunciations are not precisely emphasis based, but are more focused on sounds. If you can make the correct sounds, or closely enough approximate them, then you can generally be understood.

One also should NOT rely on text-to-speech engines pronouncing things correctly, as there are good and bad among all speech engines. To date, I have not encountered any which “always get it right” consistently. Each engine has its right and wrong. At some point, I might provide short audio clips of correct pronunciations, but for now, I didn’t want to clutter the site with audio clips.

And as far as anything common I got wrong, sometimes it’s difficult to determine what is “correct”, because you’ve got people out there on the Internet who think they know everything about everything, but are oftentimes circulating misinformation. Their “opinion” is that they’re “right”, and everyone who disagrees with them are just “wrong”. I perhaps have some of the Japanese wrong, but did the best I could with what I had to work with in terms of free resources. I unfortunately also had some resources disappear on me throughout the course of writing the first novel, which then echoes or ripples into later novels.

I lost a valuable Japanese language resource which just disappeared on me without any warning or forwarding, leaving me rather fumbling about on the Japanese. For reasons I still don’t understand, the same thing happened with a lot of my flight calculators I initially used to determine flight times; no explanation as to what happened; they just disappeared or later failed to function as they once did, forcing me to find alternatives which may or may not agree with all previously published results. I’d rather work on further story than dig back into records and check every possible flight time.

Did I consider alternatives to the dash or hyphen? Yes. However, one must be careful of this choice because many computer systems use various special characters for special purposes in computer file systems. Two good examples are the asterisk or “star” (*) and/or vertical bar (|). One also encounters potential problems with other useful special characters like at symbol (@), exclamation (!), number or pound sign (#), colon (:) and so on. Some of these might be visually interesting, but are perhaps a little too “out there” … so I kept it simple and went with the dash or hyphen.

hope this Author’s Note has helped shed some useful light on A-Ware and other pronunciations as used in the series, and thanks for reading this Author’s Note!