: Constructed Language - how to spell words that will be mispronounced in English I wasn't sure how to phrase the title, so it may be a bit confusing. Feel free to edit it if you can phrase

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I've decided to add a second, separate answer to my earlier one in order to flag up a specific suggestion made by another SE user on the English Language & Usage Stack Exchange.

After reading the part in your original question that focussed on how to indicate that the "sh" in "Ashe" was two separate sounds rather than a digraph, I became interested in whether there was an existing means of showing this in English orthography for transcribing real-life foreign languages. So I asked the following question on the English Language & Usage SE, "Is there an equivalent for diaeresis, but for consonants?", citing your question here as being what prompted me to ask.

When it comes to existing usage, the answer appears to be no, there isn't. However SE user "chasly from UK" suggested in this answer that you could simply add a diaeresis to the letter h, like this:

Asḧe

and gave a link to a site giving unicode and HTML codes for doing this.

Another possibility that I think I remember seeing someone do once might be to add a full stop between characters without a following space, thus:

As.he

Personally, I'm going to have two of my characters have an argument about how the hell do you transcribe Alienese s-followed-by-separate-h into English anyway?

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First, why do you care? You say that you want the language to have a certain sound. Why? Does it matter to the plot? Or are you getting yourself distracted with creating this language rather than writing an interesting story?

I mean, suppose that when you are writing the story you write the word "Ashe" and in your mind you pronounce it "ahs-hay" but most of your readers pronounce it "ash". So what? Does this matter to the story? Is there any incident in the story that depends on how the word is pronounced?

If you really think it's important ...

There are many foreign words whose pronunciation is difficult to represent with conventional English. Look at how many Americans pronounce Al Qaeda as if the "ae" made a single vowel sound. The hardest part, I think, is making clear when two or more letters combine to make a single sound versus having separate sounds, like your "Ashe" example. (My first thought is that it should be pronounced "ash", just like if the "e" wasn't there.) I don't see how to beat this without using some punctuation to separate syllables, like apostrophes or hyphens. If you want readers to pronounce it Ahs-hay, then write "Ahs-hay".

You could have a pronunciation guide. I suspect readers would have a mixed reaction to this. Probably most will skim it, say "yeah whatever", and make up their own pronunciation as they go along. A few will get fanatical about learning all the details of your language that you care to share. Like the Star Trek folks went to great effort to invent a complete Klingon language. A few extreme fans download Klingon dictionaries and learn the language. But the vast majority couldn't care less, and listen to the Klingon dialogue exactly the same as they would if it was just a bunch of random noises.

You could use accent marks or the International Phonetic Alphabet. 99% of readers will have no idea how to pronounce these. You could explain it, in which case you're back to having a pronunciation guide, albeit one that someone else invented instead of you inventing just for this book. If you don't explain it, very few will research it. They'll just muddle through and be annoyed with you for using these unfamiliar symbols.

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If it means that much to you, have a pronunciation guide up front — not an appendix, but before the main text. And then just sigh and accept that half your readers aren't going to get it right anyway.

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You could have an appendix (such as appears in the best-selling Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan) that explains pronunciations. However even that is subject to pismronunciation.

Of course there already is a way to write these things. It is called IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. The problem is that most of us don't learn it at school. However, if you did use it then all your writing problems would go away.

I won't render your names in IPA because I still don't know how you really want to pronounce them despite your explanation.

I am guessing that, given that you are writing from an English speaking perspective, your names sound like unusual English words when spoken. If that is the case you don't need the full gamut of IPA. You could use just the English subset.

International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If you were really adventurous and wanted to get distracted from actual writing, you could invent your own script and then explain it with an appendix that references IPA. However that requires a commitment from readers that most authors don't get.

Bear in mind that this will only become an issue when the movie gets released and disappointed readers discover that they have been saying the names wrongly all along.

Alternatively use Tolkien's clever strategy of making names almost like English ones, e.g. Samwise which conveniently contracts to Sam.

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Do people using the constructed language use a Latin-based alphabet similar to English, or do they have an entirely different writing system?

Spelling it "oddly" would make sense if the people literally use the symbols A-s-h-e or S-y-a-n to write their name. For example, they could be descendants of Portuguese-speaking people from Brazil whose language has evolved over several hundred years, in which case they would use similar letters as English, but with different pronunciations (in this case though, you'd probably want the spelling to at least resemble modern Brazilian Portuguese).

But if they're aliens from Zeta-Beta-Seven who write their name using something like Cuneiform, we would normally spell the English transliteration of their name using normal English pronunciation rules. Of course, English pronunciation is far from normalized, but that's another topic.

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Your suggested writing system is very confusing. I think what you need to do is come up with a list of the language's phonemes, and then use whatever is the most common way of writing that phoneme in English (if English indeed does have that phoneme.) Or why don't you just spell words the ways you wrote in the question to explain how they're pronounced?

Syan: you say it should be pronounced "S yahn". Is there a glottal stop between the s and the y? If so it really would be appropriate to use a ', as it is widely used for glottal stops in real languages. Otherwise you could consider using a 'j' instead of a 'y'.
Seic: it should probably be spelt seiik.
Ashe: if the second vowel is [ei] then spell it consistently. And you probably are actually putting a glottal stop between the syllables: as'hei or ahs'hei

From these examples I am guessing you have these phonemes, and I'd recommend spelling them exactly that way:

Vowels: a (or ah, depending on whether there's a second 'a' sound), ei, i

Consonants: k, s, y (or maybe j), h

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A few ideas:

You could have a character who doesn't speak that language ask how the name is pronounced, or mispronounce it and receive a correction. Obviously it would look contrived for this to keep happening, but doing it once or twice would be enough to introduce the general rule.

Use Matt Ellen's idea of a diaeresis / umlaut for the first two names mentioned (Sÿan and Seïc) and use an acute accent on the final 'e' for the last, giving Ashé.

Use a macron: Seīc, Ashē. Unfortunately that does not work for Syan. HTML codes for writing macrons can be found here.

Double the i for "Seiic" to get the desired pronunciation.

That said, whatever you do, I regret to say that 95% of your readers will read the unfamiliar combinations of letters as 'Something like that colour cyan' or 'Ash'. Please don't take this amiss; personally I think that a well-made conlang is a thing of beauty in itself and a great aid to the willing suspension of disbelief, but studies have shown that most people read exotic words in an almost purely visual way, rather as one would read Chinese characters.
Looking at it positively, the fact that most readers won't try very hard to pronounce names does in a way free the author to choose between the various possible renderings of names on their aesthetic appeal, or even on the basis of subconscious criteria which the author cannot explain but just seem to suggest one particular spelling as the 'right' one. Which of Sayik, Seic, Seīc, Seiic, or Seïc seems to best fit the character?
Edit: Proving my own point about readers' carelessness, I've only just realised that I've been misreading your desired pronunciation of Ashe and quite missed that you want the "sh" not to be read as a digraph. That's a difficult one. I can't really improve on Matt Ellen's suggestion of a phonetic spelling, or just decide you will spell it by your own rules and let the readers do as they will.

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If you don't want to use an apostrophe, then consider a diaeresis. It used to be common in English to mark vowels that come after vowels, but need to be pronounced separately, with a diaeresis for example:

noöne
coördinate
Zoë

Also, this format is used in Lord of The Rings, e.g. in Fëanor, to make sure the e is pronounced separately. (You can read this for more details.)

So your examples would be

Sÿan
Seïc

It doesn't work for Ashe. I'm not sure what you'd do other than an apostrophe there. Since it's a transliteration, maybe spell it differently in English, e.g. Asshay.

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