Quote:
Originally Posted by Bontogies
The poet is vergil... I'm sorry, that bothered me quite a bit, being a latin nerd myself
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His full name was Publius Vergilius Maro. While I have seen it historically depicted as both VER-gil as well as VIR-gil, you are right; 'Vergil' is more accurate in the sense of Latin translation.
But I had to look at it in terms of English (I should probably specify 'American') phonetics, and how it would be percieved by the playerbase. Ours is not a society known for understanding (let alone following) our own grammatical rules, and given the affluence of "how do you pronounce X champion's name?" threads, I wanted to go for the most visually approachable spelling to avoid any misconceptions. I did not want my wise and intellectually-driven character to be confused with "Vurgle, Teemo's long-lost hillbilly cousin." One letter can make a vast difference if it is interpreted the wrong way. I chose to implement a homophonetic subtlety in an effort to make the name more approachable in both text and speech.
All that aside, I think that breaking away from the traditional spelling similarly distances my character from his namesake; it feels to me that he is named after an idealism that Maro has come to represent, rather than simply being named after the man himself.
Hope this was insightful. Always a pleasure to meet a fellow geek!
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