Hyrkanian Demi-vowels

I've been reading the recent trade paperback collections of the early-70's (and pre-Arnie) Conan the Barbarian comic book. In the fourth volume, on page 38, Conan throws a rope to the recently introduced Red Sonja, saying, "Here, Son-ya. Catch!" She replies, "You pronounce my name as if there's apish blood in your veins, man. I'll have to teach you your Hyrkanian demi-vowels one day soon."

What does Sonja (or, more properly, the writer of the comic book) mean by "Hyrkanian demi-vowels"? It's difficult to guess based only on the spellings used to indicate the two different pronunciations: "Son-ya" and "Sonja".

In order to figure out what a "demi-vowel" is supposed to be, let's first try to figure out where Sonja is from. Conan is set in Robert E. Howard's fictional pre-history of Europe, Africa, and Asia. As the first issue of the comic book describes it:

The Hyborian Age!

Come with us, back to the dark centuries which sprawl between the sinking of Atlantis and the dawn of recorded time—to the days when the now-forgotten land of Aquilonia was the mightiest of nations—and a man's life was worth no more than the strength of his sword-arm!

There are several different maps of the Hyborian Age, including this one, which shows a nation called Hyrkania east of the Vilayet Sea, and this handy one that overlays a map of continental Europe. Howard played pretty fast and loose with geography—he seems to have filled in the Baltic and the Mediterranean, and Africa and the Middle East have been squeezed together in such a way that Iranistan is adjacent to Zembabwei—but his invented pre-historic nations usually corresponded obviously to some later civilization (the first rule of writing fantastic fiction: don't invent what you can borrow). It looks like the Vilayet Sea is supposed to correspond to the Caspian Sea; if Hyrkania is to the east of it, it ought to roughly correspond to modern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, or Turkmenistan. It's hard to be sure, though, because Iran has been displaced so far to the south. Hyrkania may be intended to correspond to a country further to the north, like Russia.

There's more evidence that this is where Sonja is from. At the end of the fourth volume of the Conan comic book, there's an essay by Roy Thomas, the writer of the series. He describes the origin of the character Red Sonja, and she was not originally part of the Conan universe. Thomas brought her character into the comic when he adapted a non-Conan Howard story titled "The Shadow of the Vulture". That story takes place in Vienna in 1529, and the character of "Sonya" was a Russian warrior. Thomas changed her name to "Sonja" and relocated her to the Hyborian Age.

So, if Sonja was a pre-historic Russian, perhaps "demi-vowels" refers to the palatalized consonants in Russian. That fits the the two spellings Thomas uses: Conan's "Son-ya" must be something like [son.ja], whereas the correct "Sonja" must be closer to [so.nʲa] (<disclaim>I know almost nothing about Russian</disclaim>). This is just the sort of subtle difference in pronunciation that you'd expect a non-native speaker like Conan (the Cimmerian) not to be able to make.

I think Thomas is also poking fun at a writer's trick, in which a character "pronounces phonetically" the name of another character that might be unfamiliar to readers (young readers, in this case). In fact, when Conan first meets Sonja on page 18, the following exchange occurs:

Conan: Crom, but this was thirsty work! What was your name again, woman?

Sonja: They call me Red Sonja—they that speak of me at all.

Conan: Son-ya?

This trick communicates the pronunciation of a possibly unfamiliar name to a reader, even though it makes for pretty unnatural dialog—in a real conversation, Sonja would probably stare at Conan like he's an idiot, and then say, "Yes, Sonja. Are you deaf?"

If I'm not reading too much cleverness into a line in a thirty-year-old sword-and-sorcery comic, then this is a pretty sophisticated linguistic joke. Roy Thomas, I salute you!

[Now playing: "Wonderwall" by the Mike Flowers Pops]

Comments

[language hat]

But why would you change Sonya to "Sonja" while keeping the intended pronunciation in a work intended for English-speakers? I find this completely baffling. I mean, why not make it Xvnqh and then cleverly indicate to the reader that this is to be read "Sonya"?

[The Tensor]

I wondered about that too. Thomas says:

"I felt Conan's new comrade and sometime sparring-partner should not be quite 100% the same one as appeared in 'Shadow,' so I changed the spelling of her name from 'Sonya' to 'Sonja.'"

...which doesn't do much to explain it. It wasn't a trademark or copyright issue -- Marvel had a deal with the Howard estate to adapt his stories and use his characters.

[Quinn]

While phonetics isn't my specialty, I do study Slavic Linguistics and am quite familiar with Russian. As far as I know (and my actual Russian phonology course isn't until next winter, mind you) the only meaningful difference between the two transcriptions above is how they're written. The Russian j+vowel letters are considered by linguists to be [palatalize preceding consonant]+vowel, but for a non-linguist, treating them as j+vowel works just as well. If I were to make a pretty confident guess, I'd say even Russian transcriptions of these vowels would be "i kratkoe" (their relatively infrequently used jot letter) plus vowel, not "mjagkii znak" (the "soft sign," used to palatalize the preceding letter) plus vowel.

The only possible pronunciation correction I can think of would be if he misplaced the stress, because it would alter the quality of the o. (Unstressed o in standard Russian becomes a; this pronunciation characteristic is called akan'e.) Thus, if the stress were on the second syllable, her name would be san.'ja instead of 'son.ja. But that's definitely not the case here.

Hyrkanian demi-vowels... beats me. I'll bring it up in Russian phonology next quarter.

[John Cowan]

There is in fact a sharp four-way distinction in Russian between (excuse the ad-hoc romanization, in which ';' is a diacritic meaning "palatalized"):

sona (written S-O-N-A in Cyrillic)

son;a (written S-O-N-YA)

sonja (written S-O-N-HARDSIGN-YA)

son;ja (written S-O-N-SOFTSIGN-YA)

"The distinction between the last two is unstable in the standard language; the third is often replaced by the fourth. But confusing either one with the second would be perceived as a heavy foreign accent." --Ivan Derzhanski

[A.M.D.F.]

I am Russian. The name Sonja/Sonya in Russian is Соня and pronounced S-O-palatalised N-A with stress on letter "o". So, the best English transcription, I think, will be Sonya.

[sh4d0w]

Yankee go home!

[fiffa46]

From what I read is that they took the character of Sonya from a non Conan work by Robert E. Howard and changed it to Sonja. This was for several reasons. One was listed above in regards to hit NOT being considered the same character. The second was to be able to write a history for Sonja which would not change any history intended for Sonya (even though no history exists). This way he takes a Howard style name and creates his own personal character to fit into the adaptations of Howard's works. He did not want people to read about Red Sonja and think that it was Red Sonya.

As for the locations of Hyrkania, Turan, Iranistan and the like that was already explained by Robert E. Howard. The Hyrkanians moved more northward and started to move west of the Vilayet as well. The Vanir and the Aesir started to move southward. Turan was forced to move south. Basically as you can see, everyone started to move for various reasons. Imperialism, changes in climate and the like. The picts basically destroyed parts of Aquilonia and the Cimerians being presured by the picts to the west and the Vanir and Aesir to the north ended their long treck down in what would eventually become Sumeria. Notice the similarity in names? Anyway what appeared in that specific comic was very out of character for Conan who in the Howard stories had a knack for languages.