My Life as a Darklord of Pronunciation

My boys have really gotten into Square Enix’s My Life as a Darklord, a down-loadable game for the Wii. Unfortunately, it has brought up an awkward issue of pronunciation.

In the game you play Mira — an adolescent with megalomaniac aspirations. You help her build towers, populate them with monsters and then destroy the hordes of do-gooder adventurers who come to scale your tower in hopes of the treasure it holds. Basically the game is a dungeon crawler in reverse.

Where this game touches on my interests is in that one of the monsters you have available is a “behemoth.” My sons were unfamiliar with this term and asked me how to pronounce it. Coming from the Hebrew בהמות, I said that it should be pronounced behē’mōθ, as in the Hebrew (with, sadly the obligatory spirantization of the dental). My wife said that she thought it was pronounced either be’hemoθ or behē’moθ. This, of course, sounds like crazy talk to me. I’ll capitulate on the spirantized dental, but let’s not even begin talking about moving the stress to a pre-penultimate position!