Man, am I a fish out of water. XD;
Also, this one got kind of long, so I apologize, linguistics is one of my academic interests, I hope it doesn't turn out to be too dry and boring. ^^
Also, I know everyone probably has a basic understanding of English pronunciation, but it made explaining particular things easier if I explained some basic stuff you guys probably already know.So, I've had a post-collegiate reading ability since I was in, I believe fourth or fifth grade, and I've always enjoyed learning about etymology and stuff. Plus, the school I went to (public, if you believe it) required ALL students to take either French or Spanish every year they attended, though we didn't have any of the 'cooler' (less common here in America) languages like German or Latin, so I grew up in a sort of feedback loop of learning French grammar and then realizing I was learning grammar itself, insofar as getting a basic understanding of how it works in a language.
As for a lot of those words, I was the nerd who bought the biggest, coolest dictionary he could find, and then perused it from time to time...
I didn't actually get introduced to the wider world of tabletop gaming and its unique vocabulary until high school, so I'm afraid that most of these words I learned through tv, books, movies, or for the more lich-y words, RPG video games like Baldur's Gate (technically AD&D, but I didn't get it working on my computer until later on in my youth, so I don't really think it counts).
As for the pronunciation of those words, it depends on a lot of things. English is in a weird dimensional warp somewhere between Norwegian, Dutch, French, and Latin, so depending on where the word comes from, it can make a pretty big difference, not even accounting for how formally the person speaks, or his accent.
For French loanwords like melee and coup, they're pronounced more or less the same, besides the accent. Then again, reconnaitre became (by way of reconnaissance) English reconnoiter (reh-con-OY-ter), and my nephew used to pronounce the word terrain (tuh-rein/tuh-ra"n; sorry, that's the closest I think it'll let me get to an a-umlaut, though the actual sound is somewhere between the French 'ain' and the German sound) so that it was indistinguishable from Terran. XD
As for deity, two pronunciations are correct: DAY-itee and dee-itee (or to be clearer for Drul, more like the German word
die followed by i as in ich, and then
tie. : die-itie)
Generally, English has a SIMILAR sound for the consonant as German, though not as heavy and guttural, more forward in the mouth, but the vowels are a lot farther apart from one another than they are in French or German, so it feels sort of like you're stretching your mouth wide compared to those languages, where the vowels are fairly close together as far as how you form your mouth. While learning both languages I noticed I had to be extra precise because the vowels are much more exact, less... I guess boisterous, though that's not really the best way to phrase it.
But honestly, I have a tendency to pronounce weird looking words more like languages with similar spellings, so I'd be more apt to pronounce a word like Daarech (totally made that up, so don't freak out if you don't know what it is) like Low Saxon or maybe Norwegian, because I'm more familiar with how to pronounce weird spellings in those languages.
In the end, though, the proper pronunciation is basically whatever ends up getting said more, so I guess we eventually reach a bit of an impasse. ^^;
P.S.: It doesn't help that English often allows several similar but not identical pronunciations of a word to be valid, either based on geography or personal preference. In England, brazier and brassiere may sound different, I don't know, but in the part of America I come from, they'd really only be distinguishable if the speaker spoke very properly and you listened very closely, because the only difference in how *I* pronounce them is a
slight change in where I would put the stress.
Anyways, I hope that was clear enough to understand, and enlightening, or at least not too boring. It's kind of hard to explain the pronunciation if you aren't good with the IPA!
