Lemmings Forums

RTW always says the second one, but I think it's the first one.

Mod EDIT: More descriptive title.

The name comes from the scientific name of the tribe of Lemmings, so it should really be pronounced according to the normal rules for Anglicised Latin, which would give "LEM-in-eye".

LEM-in-ee. I wasn't aware of the scientific name / Latin thing when I first heard of Lemmini, and that pronunciation just stuck.

RTW's 'Lem-mini' is a neat interpretation

The German pronunciation of Latin is Lem-IN-ee. Volker Oth is German, but I don't know about rtw.

-- Simon

I always thought Lemmini rhymed with Gemini so I pronounce it LEM-in-eye. Who would've thought the pronounciation would be so interestingly controversial?

The German pronunciation of Latin is Lem-IN-ee.

I've been pronouncing it this way since I first encountered it, I must admit.

The name comes from the scientific name of the tribe of Lemmings, so it should really be pronounced according to the normal rules for Anglicised Latin, which would give "LEM-in-eye".

Sound reasoning, but why Anglicised (i.e. botched up) Latin and not just Latin?
The Latin and the German (and in fact for any language that's reasonably phonetic) pronunciation is Lemm-in-ee (or why am I not just writing Lemmini, which in its phonetic reading is exactly what I want to express, see what I'm getting at wrt to simplicity here?), here Latin being the origin of the word and German being the background of the author of Lemmini, 0xdeadbeef or Volker Oth. Then again, most of the Lemmings community is English, so...
Btw, I was gonna write Lem-mi-nee as that's how I'd separate the syllables, but then I noticed that might be ambiguous (yeah, English...), even though these are the exact same letters as Lemm-in-ee.

As for comparing it to Gemini, same issue there. It's Latin, originally.

Hmm, so Gemini is originally pronounced as jem-in-nee in Latin?  Guess that makes sense but never crossed my mind.

Never even occurred to me the Lem-in-eye pronunciation, I had always thought of it as lem-mini.  I actually suspect most English speakers will go with lem-mini if they know nothing about the origin and is asked to guess what the pronunciation is.  (On that note, it may be interesting to feed this to a few different text-to-speech engines to see how the computer does it--assuming it doesn't directly have an entry for that word in its database, presumably it would come up with a pronunciation based on patterns extracted via machine learning from the data it was trained with, which in some sense may mimic a human's "guess the pronunciation".)

I think Proxima is just pointing out the rules the English has traditionally been using to pronounce taxonomy in biology, though I've always thought such terms were supposed to be pronounced exactly like in Latin (this isn't the kind of thing that was ever covered in my English nor science classes anyhow).  I don't think he's advocating that as the only valid pronunciation, in fact I don't even know for sure if he himself actually says it that way.

Sound reasoning, but why Anglicised (i.e. botched up) Latin and not just Latin?

As ccexplore said, Anglicised pronunciation is traditional for biological nomenclature, as well as the large number of English words that are imports from Latin. The languages have sufficiently different phonologies that switching to authentic Latin pronunciation mid-sentence sounds jarring. Some Latin pronunciation rules are never observed by English speakers -- if lemmings had been known to the ancient Romans, they would have pronounced "lemmini" with a double /m/, like the double consonants in Japanese.

Gemini was pronounced ge-mi-nee in Latin. Changing G to "j" is another Anglicisation 

The Latin and the German (and in fact for any language that's reasonably phonetic) pronunciation is Lemm-in-ee

I instinctively pronounce it LEM-in-EE (/'lɛm.ɪ.ni:/ -- I think that's right, but I'm rusty on my IPA) with the stress on the first syllable and partial stress on the last; sounds close to "remedy" or "apogee" or "effigy" in terms of emphasis, although that would probably only be helpful to people who live near me.

wow I never would've thought anyone pronounced it "LeminEYE"

I always thought the name meant: "Lemmings + mini" "mini Lemmings"  [because the screen is small compared to DOS Lemmings...]