Wait, WHAT?
Game of Thrones season eight is on its way – and we officially can’t wait.
Our past few months have been dominated by Game of Thrones news and updates, from the emergence of the teaser trailer to theories about what’s to come in Westeros.
But it wasn’t Sophie Turner confessing to being banned from washing her hair during filming and Kit Harrington taking one of his props as a momento or Maisie William talking about her final scene that had the world talking today.
Instead, it was Emilia Clarke’s character, Daenerys Targaryen herself, who made news as it turned out we’ve all been pronouncing her title, Khaleesi, wrong all along.
Yes, really. But don’t worry – we’re not alone – the characters in the series have been saying it wrong too.
According to David Peterson, the linguist behind Game of Thrones languages, the mispronunciation of Daenerys’ title had come to be ‘a real thorn in his side’, blaming himself for why it was pronounced incorrectly.
According to Digital Spy, the linguist opened up on how he built languages from George RR Martin’s works during his appearance on the podcast, The Allusionist, and he couldn’t help but voice his regrets.
‘I wanted to make sure if something was spelled differently, it was pronounced differently,’ the linguist explained. ‘That worked pretty well for everything except the word “Khaleesi”, which is just a real thorn in my side.’
He continued: ‘There’s no way it should be pronounced “ka-LEE-see” based on the spelling. So I had to decide, am I going to re-spell this thing because I know how people are going to pronounce this, or am I going to honour that spelling and pronounce it differently? I made the latter decision and I think it was the wrong decision.
Game of Thrones
‘Changing the spelling to “Khalisi” would have fixed all my problems,’ he went on to admit. ’“EE” and “I” can’t be pronounced the same because they’re spelled differently. If I want to honour George RR Martin’s spellings, that would give us the pronunciation CHA-LAY-eh-see.’
Well, our minds are officially blown, but hopefully we’ll have got over it by the first episode of Game of Thrones season 8!
April 15, people! Put it in your diaries!
The post We’ve all been pronouncing Khaleesi’s name wrong this whole time appeared first on Marie Claire.