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Joined: Dec 2013
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stranger
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Hey everybody!

One of my friends released a game a while ago but has only recently decided to change its name. The new name he picked, 'Ainion', didn't sit well with myself as I found it difficult to pronounce, so I thought I would run a test and ask a group of random people during the day how they would say it. Interestingly, all but two people pronounced it differently!

So I thought I would look a little more into this (as my friend is sure it's a suitable name) and decided I'd turn to you guys! My question is quite simple; Why can't people from the same English-speaking region pronounce Ainion consistently?

Thanks to you all! smile

Last edited by Bablakeluke; 12/08/2013 11:27 PM.
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For one thing you have a conflict between onion and ion. Also the Ai could be pronounced like a long A or like eye. That's four pronunciations right there. You might also get the inion part pronounced like the bump on the back of the skull, IN-ee-un, giving you Ay-IN-ee-un. I'd be interested in know what all pronunciations you got from your random people. BTW, I googled "ainion" and got 14 billion hits. Might not be a real good name.

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>14 billion hits

what's up with that?! they all seem to be false hits (okay, I didn't look at all of them).

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Originally Posted By: tsuwm
>14 billion hits

what's up with that?! they all seem to be false hits (okay, I didn't look at all of them).


Really. I didn't see ainion in any of them. Nor anion neither, which is what Google seemed to think I wanted. It didn't even offer me the option of showing results for ainion instead.

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My first thought was to pronounce it like onion but with a long A at the beginning: ayn-yun. The spelling is confusing.

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old hand
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I didn't see ainion in any of them

Type in 'Ainion meaning"
there are references to elves and angels.

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Orson Scott Card, author of current movie "Ender's Game",
uses a form ainu, to mean an inner part of an individual
even deeper than a soul.


----please, draw me a sheep----
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Originally Posted By: olly
I didn't see ainion in any of them

Type in 'Ainion meaning"
there are references to elves and angels.


Anything saying how to pronounce it?

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old hand
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Ainion. (Eye-nee-on)

i woulda said ehnion

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Just to be contrary I would pronounce it /'injən/ or in curious eye-dialect, unreproducible form "EEN-yun. Goign for a sort of British approximation of Oedipus even though it's probably not from Greek αινος (ainos) 'tale, fable' or αινος (ainos) 'dread, terrible'.

[Fixed typo.]


Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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stranger
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Some interesting replies here, Thank you all! I hadn't actually thought to try Googling it myself as I assumed it was most likely rather unique, although 14 billion hits would suggest something quite the contrary! That on it's own is a good reason to not choose a word such as this one. As I'm British myself it seemed some of the variants I heard actually had a French influence; i.e. one pronounced it as "En-yoh", another more "ein-yoh". The pronounciation two people unknowingly shared was as above; "eye-nee-on".

As for a meaning of 'Angels', that's very interesting; it's amazing how some supposedly random words can have such a beautiful meaning.

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Yeahbutİ the 14 billion hits never seemed to have ainion in them anywhere.

Faldage #213885 01/08/2014 4:32 PM
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old hand
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If you exclude the "anion" bit from the google results, there are about 34000 hits left, some of them interestingly referring to
Tolkien


Moderated by  Jackie 

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