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Baaaaaaaaaaaaal

There's an audio link here which gives you the correct pronunciation...

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/baal?s=t

 dusara217 wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Apparently it is bahl in British English and bail in US English.

So bahl is correct.

Baal is a reference to the god Baal from northern Africa, which is pronounced bay-ul. It's not 'murican pronunciation versus British pronunciation, it's true pronunciation versus people who don't know what they're talking about.

Just FYI, started worship off the east coast of Med towards Fertile Crescent, trade and colonization moved it to North Africa. But other than that you are right.

Barl sounds coolest

 dusara217 wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Apparently it is bahl in British English and bail in US English.

So bahl is correct.

Baal is a reference to the god Baal from northern Africa, which is pronounced bay-ul. It's not 'murican pronunciation versus British pronunciation, it's true pronunciation versus people who don't know what they're talking about.

Just so you know, he was referring to the fact that in this thread the Americans are going with "bail", while the British are going with "bahl". It was a joke

I say "bahl"

Americans, at least, pronounce Baal as either ball (like basketball) or bail (like a bail bond).

In semitic languages, Baal is pronounced Bah-Al, a 2 syllable word. Most of the times that there are 2 vowels next to each other in semitic languages, they are pronounced separately as 2 syllables.

I studied various semitic languages in college and came to the realization that if you pronounce words with the correct pronunciation (like Baal) you'll come of as kinda hoity-toity. Might as well just say ball so that everybody knows what you are talking about. There is no way I would say "Ba'al Predator" at a game store.

 cvtuttle wrote:
There's an audio link here which gives you the correct pronunciation...

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/baal?s=t

This may not be the baal you are looking for...
baal [bahl] adverb, Australian Slang. 1. no; not.

 dusara217 wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Apparently it is bahl in British English and bail in US English.

So bahl is correct.

Baal is a reference to the god Baal from northern Africa, which is pronounced bay-ul.

Except it isn't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baal

 Kilkrazy wrote:


Except it isn't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baal

Exactly, Kilkrazy is correct. Baal is a semitic title that means lord. It is often used in reference to a deity but can actually be used to describe a king in honorary terms.

The Hebrew spelling is בַּעַל, phonetically that is Ba-AL, there are two syllables. The problem is that one vowel is just the vowel pointer in the בַּ, and the other vowel is in the second syllable עַל, which makes transliteration tricky. One might be tempted to write B-AL if there are no vowel pointers, or if your hebrew is rusty. But Ba'AL is the accurate pronunciation.

But... like I said in my previous post... just say ball or bail. Nobody at a game store will know what you are talking about if you say Ba-al.

edit: semitic languages like many languages around the world are read from right to left. If you are really curious, these are the three letters that make up Baal. I've laid them out as letter - letter name - pronuciation
בּ - Bet - 'b'
ע - Ayin - vowel sound
ל - Lamed - 'l'

so without the use of vowel pointers, you might think that the word is bahl. But there are two very important vowel pointers under the בַּ and עַ. Both of them have a patach (פַּתַח) underneath, which is the horizontal line, indicating an 'ah' vowel.

So this is pronounced Bah-AhL

Excellent conversation with lots of good points but I still want to know how GW pronounces it. In the end everyone referencing things that exist in our world with the name Baal could still be wrong as the word is used in a fictional world the only correct pronunciation is that assigned to it by its creator in this context.

I stick to pronouncing things like they're spelled. Say "ball" and then stretch the 'a' sound out, do a long a and a half instead of just one.

In Blood in the Machine (I think that's the title) it was pronounced ball. Tycho tells the inquisitor "if you threaten a decendant of Sanguinius again, I will crush your bones and cast you into the deepest pit of ball". Something like that...

 dusara217 wrote:
Baal is a reference to the god Baal from northern Africa.

Baal simply means "master" or "lord". It's not a single god - the peoples that used this title could refer to any significant god with it. Sometimes because only priests were allowed to utter the name of a particular god, sometimes just because the writer/speaker didn't want to mention it any closer than "the baal of Tyre".

As for pronouncing it I go with the same A I'd use in the word hard.