Wait... that's not how it's pronounced? How IS it pronounced then?

like "here".

Weird, it was more like "hare" back when I used to roll with chakats (but it's a bit of a mess, since it's a word originally created for a written medium, not speech)

...how the heck do you get hare??????

I dunno, I didn't coin it! Probably just wanted to keep it different enough.

Pronounce it like 'herr' (which is like an english 'hare') and you're closer to the intended pronunciation, at least according to some people. Shi is sometimes pronounced 'shay'.

I gotta agree with "hare". Back when I was first reading all the Chakat Den stories, the helpful guides always had "shi" pronounced as "shay", rhyming with "hay" or "bay". "Hir", on the other hand, had two acceptable pronunciations: "here", rhyming with "deer" or "beer", and "hare", rhyming with "there" and "mare".

And since one of those has a long A vowel like "shay" and the other doesn't, I always took "hare" as the default pronunciation. Though I completely agree with Miststalker that this was a word meant to be written first and verbally pronounced second (incidentally, this is also why I pronounce "chakat" as rhyming with "jacket", simply because it rolls off the tongue easier).

awhen i interacted with people who were just like, trans people using neo-pronouns it was "here". hoenstly i don't really know chakat stuff at all.

thanks for the lesson.

Is it wrong that I thought up a whole "Who's On First?" style routine around the pronunciation of that pronoun?

Hir'd base!

That's the stuff!

"has a dick and vagina" isn't a gender.

also i'm not tagging my art with a slur.

Pronounced as "hare" and my mate is a Leopard, not a cheetah hehe. Sorry I couldn't resist pointing that out. It's good art.

whups, fixed.

How do you pronounce "shi" though?

When I initially read it, I thought it was supposed to be pronounced with an "ih" sound.
E.g. The "I" from "it".
So, when I read it, I would have "h-ih-r".
Sort-of like "his", but with an r instead of an s.

Now that I think about it, I thought it was pronounced more like "him" with an r substituting.
Resembling, but not identical to "hear".

The best way is just call them by their name.

I would argue that this is the problem with proposing alternative literary pronouns in English that too closely resemble pre-existing ones: the vast majority of English speakers, be they first-, second-, or foreign-language, will make this mistake whether they mean to or not, in no small part because it doesn't exist in their lexicon.