Author Topic: Arsen or Arken?  (Read 5375 times)

Offline windgen

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Re: Arsen or Arken?
« Reply #15 on: October 08, 2013, 04:00:41 pm »

Hmm.  This is an interesting question.  I always said "arken," because it seems obvious to me that's how it should be pronounced.  But when trying to come up with a rule to tell you why it seems obvious, I realized that I can't really come up with a good rule that can distinguish between the "c" in "arcen" and the "c" in "mercenary."

Then again, maybe I'd be pronouncing "mercenary" as "mer KEN uh ree" if I'd never heard anyone else say the word and only had the written form as a guide to pronunciation.

Or maybe it seems obvious because my mental search algorithm for recalling similar words as a guide to pronouncing new ones prioritizes prefix matches, so maybe "arcane" is flagged as a much better match than "mercenary."  And if you were "Mercen games" I'd be telling people it's obvious that it should be an "s" sound.

Offline Huw

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Re: Arsen or Arken?
« Reply #16 on: October 08, 2013, 04:27:42 pm »
I didn't even consider the soft c pronounciation, because it would be too close to arse, which in the UK is the equivalent of ass. :D
I play evenings UK timezone

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Arsen or Arken?
« Reply #17 on: October 08, 2013, 05:17:47 pm »
I didn't even consider the soft c pronounciation, because it would be too close to arse, which in the UK is the equivalent of ass. :D
Sounds like a useful fact when encountering our famous "emergent behaviors" from the RNG, and deciding how to pronounce the main vocalization.
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Offline Misery

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Re: Arsen or Arken?
« Reply #18 on: October 08, 2013, 07:38:57 pm »
Where is this "Show DLC" option, please?  Is it in the Steam settings?  I'm at work and don't have Steam installed here, otherwise I would look for myself.


Yeah, I didn't know about that myself.

I kept having this idea that DLC for the many games I have would show up on the main listing.   The fact that this kept never being the case didn't discourage me from thinking it was true, haha.

Offline x4000

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Re: Arsen or Arken?
« Reply #19 on: October 08, 2013, 08:04:02 pm »
It was true until maybe around 2 years ago.  Then they started hiding it behind that checkbox because you'd have things like 20 different train cars coming through from a train simulator, and obliterating the front page with that.  Unfortunately sizable expansion packs are not differentiated from small F2P trinkets.
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Offline PokerChen

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Re: Arsen or Arken?
« Reply #20 on: October 09, 2013, 03:45:59 am »
 The Steam feature page was such a train-wreck simulator when I finally joined up a couple of years ago. Even so, I still felt I had to click through it to help me search for goodies. ...that would be because their store browser was, and still lacks tabbed browsing, amongst other things.

 = = =
 Other pronouciations of c other than Arcen:

 - cello
 - et cetera, a latin soft-c
 - Cemal (i.e. Jamal, but Turkish)
 - c = "ts" in romanisation of chinese phonetics.
 - ce- = "the-", in some regions of Spain. My coworker Celsa says it's still not the same as "th".

 It's positively the worst-harmonised consonant, IMO.

 

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