Data Graham posted:

Data Graham posted:

So I've been going through the Mythgard Academy back catalog since ExLOTR has been on inexplicable hiatus for the past month, and I'm just now finishing up the Book of Lost Tales Part I series whose final episode has Andrew Higgins as a guest talking about Tolkien's languages:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liDmtFajom8

And while it's a good 'un with lots of worthwhile and well thought out information, the startling thing about it for me is: why does this guy, who clearly knows his material in intricate detail, down to every name and syllable and linguistic concept, keep making bafflingly elementary pronunciation mistakes?

He says Eärendil as "erry-EN-dil" and Súlimo as "soo-LEE-me-oh".

And then he surrounds his mentions of these names with lots of completely accurate analysis and theory that would only be possible if he were spelling and pronouncing the names correctly in his head.

Why is this happening? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. This is one of the biggest and weirdest mysteries of my whole life: I keep wondering how it is that people can have such blind spots about pronunciations, to the point where they can persist in saying something incorrectly even when they're surrounded for years by people saying it right. They just never absorb it. This applies to people learning second or third languages, or people reading fictional names out of books that they've only ever said silently to themselves; once corrected by a preponderance of evidence, it just never takes hold seemingly. And as a corollary, is this just me being a weird nitpicking nerd holding people to an impossible standard? Certainly I'm not going to suggest that I never make any mistakes or that I never fail to correct myself when I'm in a position like this where my presumed pronunciation of something is wrong*; and I can't claim to know more than a couple of languages with any level of fluency so I hardly have a leg to stand on. I'm not trying to throw shade on people who speak a second language every day of their lives for work, which is a hell I could hardly wish on my worst enemy. But I still wonder. I've always wondered. My wondering has underlain my entire life of trying to understand people better.

(* Case in point — for like 30 years of my life I thought it was "TOLL-kee-en"; but after hearing Corey's podcasts and internalizing the "Toll-kühn" etymology I now exclusively pronounce it "TOLL-keen". But his guests will persist in using their own pet pronunciations like "TOLL-kin" no matter how often theis not just some poindextery "well you KNOW, ackshally it's pronounced THIS way", and rather is an actual observation about how language works — in other words, how we assign meaning to spoken sounds and written words, and how we pass that meaning on to others. Whether language is prescriptive or descriptive. Whether it's important to understand the provenance of colloquial expressions that people commonly get wrong. Whether we're moving toward speaking in memes like in Darmok. It's exactly on-topic! What role do these kinds of misinterpretations play in linguistics? I feel like accuracy is really important if we're going to try to take any of this seriously.

For example! These are the questions that I keep wanting Andrew to answer as he goes through his talk:

1) If the languages Tolkien was most familiar with, on a conversational level, were Spanish and Welsh through the background of his mentor (and Latin, "as good as any Vatican City official"), does that imply that when we see an acute accent on a word in one of his languages, he intends that syllable to be stressed, the way it is in Spanish? In other words, should it be fundamentally obvious to a reader that the name Súlimo should be stressed on the first syllable, "SOO-lee-moh", simply because of the ú? As opposed to French, which seems to be an outlier in languages I'm aware of where accents (acute or grave) are not tied to stress, but are used to indicate vowel pronunciation. Anybody who's familiar with Spanish would use acute accents the way Tolkien seems to, where they indicate stress on a non-standard syllable, i.e. "not the penultimate syllable"; as counter-illustrated by all the Lamborghini owners who own a Murciélago which they pronounce "mur-see-eh-LAH-go ", like the accent has no meaning toward the pronunciation and is just a decoration or something

2) Relatedly, what do the diareses indicate? Obviously they are used to show that a pair of vowels should be NOT pronounced as a diphthong, like in Eärendil, the way you'd use it in English words like coördination if your style guide does it that way; without the dots over the ä you would be right in thinking "ea" should be considered as a single ligated sound (not as "erry-EN-dil", but something else with at least the letters in the right order). But that aside, why bother putting the diaresis on names like Manwë and Elwë? What does that do to the pronunciation that would not already have been achieved by Manwe or Elwe? It's not like the "e" would be silent in those names. What's the freakin ë for? For that matter, what about the circumflex in words like Tharkûn and Khazad-dûm and Ar-Pharazôn? How does that change the pronunciation? Are they supposed to be a way of saying "this vowel is 'long', whatever that means"—surely not the nonsensical English sense of "short" and "long" vowels where "short" means a simple, single, uncombined, isolated vowel sound, and "long" generally means an obliquely unrelated diphthong, like "æ" of "cat" versus "ā" (aka "ei") of "plate"; but rather just a more stressed version of caaaat or something like that, the way pretty much any non-English, non-Great-Vowel-Shifted language works. Is a circumflex to be considered just a mere signifier of a non-Elvish language? That seems rather beneath Tolkien, and yet people like Higgins (or the other Tolkien academic luminaries like Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter who are in the audience and yet not raising a hue and cry at his pronunciation transgressions) seem not to have any interest in exploring them.

3) When talking about phonology and inherent meaning that certain syllables derive from their sounds, i.e. the fundamental argument underlying his talk and the whole concept of Tolkien's constructed languages with their presumption that certain words at some base, bio-psychological level "sound like what they mean", why doesn't he bring up studies or concepts like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect, which bear pretty much directly on his thesis? (Granted, I'm only halfway through and I wanted to , so maybe he gets to this later, but it doesn't feel like he's on his way there.) Why does the base root mor— "sound" "dark"? I agree it does, but why? How? Isn't it maybe just the subconscious associations we have as English speakers with a passing familiarity with Latin and Romance languages where mor— carries a connotation of death? Isn't that far more likely what influenced Tolkien in the first place (at the risk of doing critfic lol)? Higgins keeps making assertions that Murmenalda sounds like "the land of sleep" but the only evidence or support he gives is that "they kind of sound similar". Which is pretty much the antithesis of the whole concept of phonological essentialism in the first place? "Murmen—" does sound like someone mumbling in their sleep, but if that's what you mean why not say that? Is there something beyond mere onomatopoeia to what Tolkien was on about? How much of (for example) a "harsh" language, i.e. one with a lot of spirants and glottals, is down to its spelling and the associations we put on particularly angular or unusual bits of the Latin alphabet being used to render names like Grishnákh and Nazgûl? Would those names be perceived as more euphonious to us if they were written in a non-Latin writing system where maybe they look "beautiful"? How different is Gorbag from cellar door anyway? I get that Higgins only has an hour and a half to talk but is his point that Tolkien's languages and their kiki-bouba "it just feels right" style are founded on an outdated and discredited linguistic concept, or is it that there's more to it than that and he was on to something that still may be relevant today? In other words, is all this language stuff just masturbation, or is it academically useful? He doesn't seem to say one way or the other, just that it's "interesting" I guess.

All this is to try to get some nagging thoughts out of my head and onto paper as it were because what they all point to in my own personal experience is the question: Am I just being a nitpicking dork and none of this matters and I should just have fun with it? Or is there actually some point in trying to get the details right, even in something as essentially frivolous as some guy's lifelong obsessive scribblings about fairies and whether English people had their myths about them correct or not?

ChubbyChecker posted:

the diaresis is there to tell you that the letters are part of different syllables, so that you don't pronounce the 'ea' in 'earendil' as you would the 'ea' in 'easy'

e-a-ren-dil, not ea-ren-dil

and the syllables in 'elwë' are elw-e, not el-we

ChubbyChecker posted:

and the syllables in 'elwë' are elw-e, not el-we

SHISHKABOB posted:

How do you pronounce elw-e?

ChubbyChecker posted:

elw-e

Data Graham posted:

s-word

SHISHKABOB posted:

What's the S word?

Tree Bucket posted:

"LW" is really difficult to pronounce. Maybe that's the Welsh influence coming through?

AlternateNu posted:

So, I've never actually owned a copy of the LotR books despite reading through them a couple times from library/loaner copies and am finally looking to get a set. This may sound like a dumb question, but is there a particular print run that would be best suited for bookshelf blingery? Something like the "Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide" compilation run by Gramercy back in 2005 for HGttG?

AlternateNu posted:

So, I've never actually owned a copy of the LotR books despite reading through them a couple times from library/loaner copies and am finally looking to get a set. This may sound like a dumb question, but is there a particular print run that would be best suited for bookshelf blingery? Something like the "Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide" compilation run by Gramercy back in 2005 for HGttG?

Runcible Cat posted:

I've got a nice recent hardback with Tolkien's own illustrations that didn't cost the earth. There's a matching Silmarillion out too, and a Hobbit out soon.

DeimosRising posted:

i've got this one

https://www.amazon.com/LORD-RINGS-Fellowship-Towers-Collectors/dp/B00M0NFYTC

and the matching hobbit

https://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-There...395177111&psc=1

but i've had them since i was pretty young and man that lotr is expensive now

AlternateNu posted:

So, I've never actually owned a copy of the LotR books despite reading through them a couple times from library/loaner copies

Tree Bucket posted:

Thread, I need a mnemonic to help me remember if it's Tolkien or Tolkein.

Judgy Fucker posted:

In German, "ie" is pronounced like "ee," and "ei" is pronounced like "eye."

I know his name is supposed to be pronounced "Tol-keen," even if I don't 'cause I don't want to stop saying it the way I have my whole life. But it's spelled the way it's pronounced in German.

That's probably not helpful to you but there you go anyway.

Tree Bucket posted:

I wanna be Tulkas when I grow up.

Wait, how have you been pronouncing it?

ChubbyChecker posted:

tolkien

Tree Bucket posted:

I wanna be Tulkas when I grow up.

Wait, how have you been pronouncing it?