Episode 11: The Asterix FAQ Podcast
This podcast is the audio edition of this post I published on the same day as this podcast titled, “The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Asterix.”
In the audio edition, you can hear me pronounce Rene Goscinny’s name right. Once. The rest of the time, my accent and pronunciation is still all over the place. Ah, podcasting!
Subscribe Today
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
Overcast
Spotify
RSSSubscribe to the Pipeline Comics Podcast
Support the Podcast:
Tell a friend! Tell ALL your friends! Even your enemies. They might be bad people, but they still don’t deserve to be deprived of good comics!
Why would this thing valdate in the middle of a phrase? Go figure. Or is it hangover hands, who knows 😉
Anyhoo
Great overview for a beginner.You might have mentioned that the origin of the series was a metaphor for France in the 60s as the European Union was blossoming around it, but I suppose it’s not necessary to understand the series any more, as it veered away from that after the first few books..
I always thought anyone could read phonetics, I learned it in school myself, apparently I was wrong. Here’s a quick one:
Astérix = Ass-Tay-Reeks
Obélix = Oh-Bay-Leaks
Vercingétorix = Vair-(somewhere between Sane and sin, like Saint without the final T)-Geay (as in Gerard)-toh-Reeks
Here is a quick audio link to the characters intro from, I believe, the first film
If you do a search for “Astérix personnages” on youtube, you should find plenty of short clips like it.
You have to remember that, unlike English, the French language does not have a tonic accent, so it means that no syllable is pronounced heavier or faster than the others.
Heh, we do think alike sometimes. I did initially have a question like, “Why is this book so French?” or “Why does this book appeal to French society?” that would have gone into that. But I wanted, for the sake of American audiences, for the book to stand on its own, much like it did for me when I first read it. Heck, I learned much of that along the way of re-reading the books last year.
As for pronunciations: I’m going to give myself leeway to Americanize a little bit of the pronunciations, much in the same way as the characters’ names were changed when they were translated to English. I also adopted the pronunciation of “Vercingetorix” that I did from Dan Harmon’s “Hardcore History” podcast. I just can’t hear it any other way. That’s likely also where I got my pronunciation of “Alesia” from.
I do try to get proper names or real humans correct, though. It’s the hardest part of doing this podcast. I still can’t get “Goscinny” right, even after listening to it ten times before hitting the record button on a podcast. Argh!
I need full French immersion!