Hi, guys. I’ve gotten a lot of new followers over the past week or so, I figured I’d answer a few of the questions I see coming up.
How do you pronounce “Scipio?”
SKIP-ee-oh. Although the proper Latin pronunciation is “SIP-ee-oh,” nobody pronunces it like that. This is America. We like to fuck up pronunciations. We are super good at that.
So the short form, Scip, is just “Skip.” I guess you could call him “Scippy,” but I don’t think even his mom does that.
What’s Reagan’s accent?
Reagan is from New York City. Probably Queens. I don’t really wanna nail down the borough without visiting one day, though.
Why are you suddenly updating so much!?
Lotta reasons.
-My new Cintiq shaves about 4 or 5 hours off of production time.
-I’ve been slacking hard due to other projects and feel bad about it.
-More updates means more hits means more money from my ad banners.
-This comic is gonna be super-long and the faster I update, the faster it’ll be finished.
-Kinda just wanted to see if I could do it.
Are you gonna keep up this pace?
Not sure. I’ll try, though. But no matter what, there will probably never be a TAZ page on the weekend. Just FAQ posts, art posts, that kinda thing.
Anyway, time to do Monday’s update. Later.
I was pretty I was taught the correct Latin pronunciation was “SKIP-ee-oh”, but junior high was a long time ago, so now I have a doubt…
EDIT : “I was pretty SURE”
Yeah, my Latin teacher was very clear on this: It’s always a hard C.
How I was taught Latin pronunciation, it would be “SKEEP-ee-oh.” Then again, this is America and it’s a dead language to boot, so…
Fairly sure that ““SIP-ee-oh” is the “vulgate” or “ecclesiastical” pronunciation – i.e., what they currently speak at the Vatican. The hard c pronunciation is the “Classical” pronunciation, which is what scholars currently believe actual educated Romans used (based, I think, on how Latin was rendered in contemporary written Greek).
Anyone who learned Latin in recent years was likely taught Classical pronunciation. Most priests use the other one…
It’s more than that – it’s that a letter making two sounds would have made no sense the way the Romans thought of orthography. Letters were written in block capitals, with no spaces, sounded out one at a time. Having two completely different pronunciations for “C” and “G” would be like having two different pronunciations for a kana.
And it would be “shipio,” I think, by the vulgar/church pronunciation, not “sipio.”
Yup. At least, that’s true for classical Latin (as opposed to Church Latin). In fact, I don’t think there are any silent consonants in classical Latin at all.
When I first encountered Scipio, I assumed his name was a play on Scipio Africanus ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scipio_Africanus ).
You’re right, Latin C is pronounced like K. I just finished a college Latin course, so I’m pretty sure about this.
Old Latin had no “soft c”. However, New Latin and the country dialects of Old Latin had “soft c’s”. Thus Caesar was pronounced “KAY-zar” but, because he was from the boonies, Cicero was pronounced “SIS-er-oh”. ^_^
“Caesar” would have been /ˈk͜aɪsɑr/, or in English spelling something like “KIE-sahr”, the syllables rhyming respectively with “by far”.
Aw nuts, I always said SEEP-eeyo, I thought it was Italian.
No matter how hard I’ve tried, I’ve never been able to change the voice I read Reagan’s lines in from “indeterminate southern accent” to “new york.” It just doesn’t compute.
Likewise. I don’t know when or where I got that impression but I absolutely cannot shake it.
Seriously. I’m from Atlanta, so it’s pretty easy to guess where I got that impression.
You know what, though? I like her just fine that way, and I see no reason to change it.
Good to know I wasn’t the only one wondering heh.
Good luck with the new schedule, Spike. I’m sure life will interfere from time to time, but I’m enjoying how quickly the story is moving along.
Thanks for verifying Scipio’s pronunciation. Along with current strips I’m working my way from the beginning, and just ran across the one where Reagan tells Ben to spell Scipio’s name with a c not a k — which struck me as a marvelously clever way of informing us (who can see the spelling for ourselves) of the pronunciation.
I feel like a humongous failure as a life-form sort of dumb now for constantly pronouncing it “Sheep-pee-O.”
I see strike-out HTML does not work here. Whoops. Ok, amended:
“I feel sort of dumb for pronouncing it as Sheep-pee-oh.”
Sorry, I just like to use strikeout text a lot.
I think it’s that you were waiting for me to show up: my husband gave me all four books for Christmas “thinking I’d like them,” and I read them in 2 days and had dreams about the characters both nights, and came here wanting more More MORE, and here is more—and RECENT more. *happy sigh*
P.S. Also I have a crush on Gene.
P.P.S. And also on Scipio.
P.P.P.S. Well, and also on Ben and Reagan, so…I guess on everyone. Plus you for writing it.
i always imagined Reagan sounded a bit like Pearl Forrester from mystery science theater 3000 with the new york accent.
Funny, when I first started reading the comic I assumed that Reagan had a Southern accent. I guess she kind of gave off a Ya-Ya Sisterhood vibe to me, you know, the decadent, eccentric Southern woman? But Noo Yawk seems to work well too.