The Studio, Nolan, Reginald pronouncing "sword"

 I was in the Studio this week:

(My part starts at the 6:33 mark):

I made a YouTube video last week:

In Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, in The Ersatz Elevator, there's a part where two pages are completely black. It's a symbol of the terror the Baudelaire orphans had when they were pushed down the elevator shaft. But one question I always wondered was-what did the audio book do at this part? Two minutes of silence? I have no idea.

This is just one example of the difficulties of bringing the written page to audio. One thing is how words are pronounced. Like, if a character has an accent, how do you write that? The famous phrase "tomato, tomato," doesn't really make sense when just written down. It's pronounced "to-may-to, to-mah-to," but how does the author put that down?

I remember reading (I think the second one) book in the Stormlight Archive. In one chapter, the character Rock yells out Kaladin's name. The sentence looked like this:

"Kaladin!" Rock shouted. He didn't pronounce it like most others, Kal-a-din, but instead Kal-a-dEEn.

When listening to the audio book, sure enough, the speaker says it Kal-a-deen at the beginning. But if this was our first time reading it, in our heads what would we say? Kal-a-din, probably.

So there's this entire issue of the written word being pronounced maybe differently in the reader's mind than what the author intended. How does an author play with this idea? I believe that the following comic is a meta-fiction exploring that point. With no other clues as to how the characters are saying the words, the comic doesn't make sense. It's a joke that doesn't make sense unless you already understood what the punchline was in the first place.

This is just my theory, but I think that Reginold (the bird) pronounces that word "sword" weird, like "saw-urd" or something. In which case the comic reads:

"Beartato! Check out this saw-urd!"

"This what?"

"This saw-urd!"

"That's not how you pronounce 'sword!'"

"Then how DO you pronounce it?"

"'Sword.'"

"Oh! Well I feel foolish."

Makes a lot more sense to me that way, but the trick is in order to get the entire joke you would have had to know he pronounces it weird in the first place. So it's a comic exploring the very idea of what I've been talking about in this blog post, the disconnect between reading and pronouncing and the idea that unless you already know how the character pronounces the word the joke doesn't make sense.