Is it Mare or Mare?

[Sadd]

I keep pronouncing Mare: ma-rey. But my friends call it mare, like a female horse. Ma-rey sounds more ghosty and fun. SO is it pronounced ma-rey or just mare?

[William]

Female horse as in night-mare.

[Sadd]

While night-mare makes sense, ma-rey is cooler to me. Try saying it and see if it sounds cool lol

[belangf]

I think it's pronounced in one syllable (maer), as in Night-mare. That is where the word comes from. These spirits sit on your chest while you sleep and give you bad dreams.

[Driplock]

Ma-rey doesn't sound cool at all. Mare fits the ghosts, ya know, as in, N I G H T M A R E (The thing it feeds off of.)

[Juggernaut]

It's literally Nightmare. Things don't sound cool objectively, you're just convincing yourself that the wrong way sounds cool.

[Naewyng]

But why does the Mare look like a human? It's supposed to be a hors

[Skorpius]

to copy from wikipedia:

Mare (Old English: mære, Old Dutch: mare, Proto-Slavic *mara; mara in Old High German, Old Norse, and Swedish)

Most scholars trace the word back to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root *mer-, associated with crushing, pressing and oppressing.

[Oc]

Marey... so help us god, I can't believe you call it that lmfao...

[greenfire32]

omg...this can't be real...

it's mare as in nightmare...

[Sadd]

No need for hostility. I'm just curious lol

[føx]

Everyone except the OP is wrong, it's pronounced ma-reh (more or less), it comes from Nordic folklore, sometimes called a mara. How we say it in English is just the bastardized version of the original pronunciation, it doesn't matter what all the youtubers are calling it or that it's the same last 4 letters as nightmare, it's pronounced ma-reh. So OP was the closest by far.

[Plaguelight]

Do you also call a room "rum" or a roof "ruff" ?

Asking for clarity.

[Josh]

Hooked on phonics failed the OP.

[0ptimistPrime (the Gray)]

Originally posted by dat_fox01:

Everyone except the OP is wrong, it's pronounced ma-reh (more or less), it comes from Nordic folklore, sometimes called a mara. How we say it in English is just the bastardized version of the original pronunciation, it doesn't matter what all the youtubers are calling it or that it's the same last 4 letters as nightmare, it's pronounced ma-reh. So OP was the closest by far.

I'm no etymologist, but I don't think that's how that works

There are words that become mainstream in English culture that are mispronounced, like Manga.
But that didn't happen with Mare. It evolved over time, passed between cultures, to become what it is today.

ex: "Beer" reportedly "comes from Middle English "ber," going back to Old English "bēor," akin to Old High German "bior," and further back to "a dissimilated form of Germanic *breura-, a nominal derivative of *brewwan-"
But that doesn't mean that everyone who says "beer" today is wrong because one of the roots of the word sounded different than the current pronunciation (spoken in a completely different language, mind you) sounds. That's why it is a root, and we don't just continue to call it "bior."

As Skorpius noted:

Mare (Old English: mære, Old Dutch: mare, Proto-Slavic *mara; mara in Old High German, Old Norse, and Swedish)

Most scholars trace the word back to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root *mer-, associated with crushing, pressing and oppressing.

So, 1) it has been traced back even further than the Norse "mara," and thus picking one point in a chain and saying "This is right, and everything before or after is wrong" seems to be flawed logic imo... and 2) the most recent root for the word, Old English "mære", looks to have been pronounced like mayr (or mair, or meyr.. you know, the way those gosh darn youtubers keep saying it). So it makes perfect sense that we'd pronounce it the same way we pronounce a female horse.

Originally posted by Josh:

Hooked on phonics failed the OP.

To be fair, applying the language rules of Spanish or Japanese languages would (iirc) make it sound like "mah-ray." And sometimes when you look at a word you don't know, you might make assumptions about where it comes from, and apply foreign pronunciations to it.
After looking into it, I'm quite confident that it is in fact "mare" just like we'd call a female horse, but I don't blame OP for making the mistake.

[PuniieGodx]

te ♥♥♥♥ you think ma-rey sounds cool ? it sounds so dumb... mare sounds a lot better as in nightmare