Jabbehakke-D is important for another reason. (Destiny)

by Funkmon , Wednesday, October 21, 2015, 22:36 (3416 days ago) @ breitzen

It says how it should be pronounced.

I don't think we can trust the diaresis in Häkke to be a German style umlaut. In German, it would be pronounced like hecku...but it also wouldn't be spelled that way. The word is in German as hacken, which means to hack. I am told it also means drunk, but I've never heard it used like that. The double k signals to me that it's probably Norwegian or Dutch.

Dutch sounds plausible, but it doesn't fit. Dutch doesn't do umlauts, but it does to diareses. We cannot have a diaresis on the a though since it doesn't distinguish it from a digraph. For those with lives, a diaresis is a thing that lets you know the next vowel is pronounced as a new syllable. Naïve, Chloë, things like that. Dutch does use them, but it would be meaningless. It would be like "Nïve." What's to change? Nothing.

So, on a single letter, it must be a type of umlaut. The umlaut is a sound change that uses the same dots as a diaresis. This must be a non standard pronunciation.

So, I thought about Luxembourgish, but hacken is the same as in German.

Norwegian doesn't have this as an umlaut. Norwegian DOES have hakken, which is the translation of hacken, so that works, but it doesn't use the diaresis. It does use an ash, which can be transliterated to an ä or even ae. Ash in Norwegian is pronounced like ash in English, like the a in cat. So it would be hackuh.

So, in my limited language knowledge, Häkke has no equivalent, though the best bet would be Norwegian hackuh. I don't, on the other hand, have any faith that Bungie did anything more than add a heavy metal umlaut or throw it in as some kind of Häagen-Dazs style hyperforeignism.

As a result, the gun Jabberhakke is the only reasonable guide we have to the pronunciation of Häkke. It's clearly meant to rhyme with Jabberwocky.

So, Häkke is pronounce "hockey."