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When I got WC3, the name I traditionally used was already taken, and I had grown less fond of it anyway. I had been taking a linguistics course that semester and so I had the (IPA) on my mind a lot. I was also thinking a lot about consonant and vowel shift and the role in the evolution on languages.
Anyway, I was thinking of various words and applying linguistic shifts for the fun of it. Then I considered the slang word for penis, cock (kak). I shifted the initial vowel further toward the back of the throat, and the vowel further back and with closed lips to make cook (qUk) in the IPA. Some sexual innuendo I suppose, but also heavily aspirating the "k" sounds is humorous and a shift to uvular is similar. I think the vowel is often written as U since the actual character doesn't exist in ASCII. Mixed caps were allowed in WC3, but I typically did not use them. I was content with a name that was decidedly phallic, yet innocent enough to pass the filters. More importantly quk is quck to say, easy to type, and probably unique and hence memorable.
In addition it intrigues me that people struggle (choke?) to pronounce the name and that is another reason why I like it. The q is hard because in English it seems to always occur followed by a u, to make a "kw" sound. So, "quk" would seem to lack a vowel leading to trouble when trying to sound it out. That leads to such pronunciations as "quick" and "quack" and "kwuk" (quuk?). In Spanish the phonetic "k" is written as "qu" when it precedes the vowels e and i and as "k" otherwise. I think it seems less strange to a Spanish speaker to pronounce quk than to an English speaker. Anyway, I like that it's strange, yet there are a few words where we have no trouble with the q being pronounced as k, such as Qatar or Iraqi. Then there's just a matter of the vowel. I think the u as in the English "put" is the least obvious sound for the letter u to have, so I chose it to make it difficult and also because it makes quk sound like an actual word when read this way "cook". For Spanish speakers, there's only one sound for u, interestingly this also sounds like an English word "kook". I like this pronunciation with the u as in "dude" but I don't like the long drawn out "oo" sound. I like the Spanish u sound, which is pretty much the same but shorter, and is also the sound for the IPA "u" which is technically the correct pronunciation of quk (lowercase qUk) under the IPA. Anyway, another possibility is the "u" sound in English "mum" or "dumb". There was a particular Canadian who prefered this pronunciation of quk "kuck" and it's the only one that really annoys me because I hadn't actually expected people would try that and it sounds really retarded.
When WoW rolled around I had to force the capitalization to Quk, which is ok because it looks sophisticated or something, but Q is not, as far as I know, a symbol in the IPA. The interesting thing is that people in WoW (immos at least) actually pronounce it as I had intended (the IPA *), whereas "kwuk" seemed to be the dominate pronunciation among my WC3 clanmates.
*ignoring caps and with the exception of the uvular q which does not occur in English and btw would probably be more Dwarvish than Night Elf but Dwarves dont have shadowmeld and are ugly whereas Night Elves are hawt and do indeed have shadowmeld.
linguistics ftw!!
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