Steve gives the pronunciation of "jhereg" with the stress on the second syllable (pronunciation guide in _Jhereg_; http://dragaera.info/encyclopedia/data/pg-test/#LETTERJ), but in the spell that Vlad uses to make his initial contact with Rocza it is evidently on the first syllable (http://www.speakeasy.org/~mamandel/filks/RoczasSong.html): Come to me, blood of my House. Join me, hunt with me, find me. Let the winds of Jungle's night Stay the hunter in her flight. Evening's breath to witch's mind Let our fates be intertwined. Jhereg! Do not pass me by! Show me where thy soul doth lie! (Jhereg, Ace edition, sixth printing, February 1987, pages 225-226, copyright 1983 by Stephen K. Z. Brust; typo corrected) But there is no contradiction between these. THEY ARE TWO DIFFERENT WORDS. The fact that we are reading these books in English tends to conceal the different languages appearing in them. "Jhereg" is presumably a Dragaeran word, like the names of all the Houses except Hawk, Orca, and Dragon, as well as the other unfamiliar animals like kethna and darr. But the spell is "a close variant" (page 235, Epilogue) of the spell that Vlad used to make a bargain with Loiosh's mother, and that "was an old spell, my grandfather had said, and had been used in the East for thousands of years, unchanged" (page 5, Prologue). And therefore that spell was almost certainly in an Eastern language, specifically, Fenarian. Even if the Dragaeran word (translated by Brust as) "jhereg" and the corresponding Fenarian word are related and similar, they would not have to be identical. The word "dragon" has the identical spelling and meaning in English and in French, but the pronunciations are quite different. What's more, Fenarian is Hungarian, and all Hungarian words are accented on the first syllable. I know this professionally, but you can find a sufficiently authoritative statement in the Afterword (or whatever it's called) of _The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars_. Furthermore, the spell is an older form of Fenarian. Tradition holds it to have been unchanged for thousands of years, and Brust-the-translator's (http://www.speakeasy.org/~mamandel/Cracks-and-Shards/cracks.html#Brusts) use of the archaic English words "thy" and "doth" and the transitive verb "stay" supports this assertion. (Actually, that would make it more likely to be similar to the Dragaeran word, but even with the greatly slowed pace of language change we see on Dragaera, a time depth of over 200,000 years is enough to account for any difference we like.) -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel http://cracksandshards.com a Steven Brust Dragaera fan website [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.] __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250