How to pronounce Caelian


I've been asked a few times on how to pronounce Caelian properly and as always I'm here to serve. But first, I want to give you a little history on how I came up with the name.

When researching for Lost, I wanted the race of altered human's and their history to be as believable as possible. So I gathered facts: I knew the meteorite would land in southern Europe, around Rome during the great war. In the early 19th century we didn't have the technology to monitor the space around Earth consistently or have the ability to warn of an impending collision and that means rogue meteors "could" have happened. Science as we know it today was just started to emerge, but the laymen was still superstitious (especially in rural areas).

With these facts, I began looking into Roman mythology and found Caelus.

Caelus appears at the top of the curiass of Augustus of Prima Porta. One of the few depictions of Caelus in art.


PAUSE for a brief mythology lesson: 

Caelus, the Roman god of the Sky and the equivalent to the Greek god Uranus.  Caelus is the son of Aether (primordial deity representing the upper air in our atmosphere) and Dies or "Daylight". He is often paired with Terra "Earth" as the mother & father (mother earth & father sky), although to my knowledge they did not have children together. Caelus is the father of the Roman god Janus, Saturn, and Ops. Caelus is also the father of one of the three forms of Jupiter. 

Random fact: Caelum is the Latin work for "sky" which is where we get our English word celestial.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I loved the idea that the name of this new race of human's to derive from a meteor/ meteorite  named after the Roman god of the sky and it's believable since nearly all celestial bodies are named in that manner. So I created the Caelian's. 

To figure out how to pronounce Caelian, I had to look at its root work Caelus. There are two camps of pronunciation: Classical that uses a hard 'C' and modern that pronounces the 'C' as an 'S'. I decided to firmly place myself in the classical camp. Caelus is Latin in it's roots, not English after all.

Random Fact: Caelian is also the name of one of the seven hills in Rome, but that version is pronounced with an 'S'.

Caelum is pronounced kae̯.lum

Caelus is very similar kae̯.lus. 

So Caelian would be pronounced kae̯.lē-ən. However, my southern tends to come out and sometimes it comes out as Kay instead of Kae. Either way is fine with me, but just don't just the soft 'S'. That would drive me insane.

Stay Awesome!