Eight Tips for Pronouncing Tolkien's Elvish Names

[@lore_house]

Give us the deep dive!!!

[@the_bottle_imp]

Yes please!!

[@julesb7783]

Fantastic resource video, helped me understand the Elven language better, thank you. But I would like to see a more in depth lesson too, covering all of appendix E.

[@wannesverhoeven1825]

Should be obligatory watching for all Tolkien tubers. Good stuff. And vital. The beauty of the individual word (its look, sound and taste) was of the utmost importance to prof. Tolkien.

[@docopoper]

Eressëa is going to be a hard one to change the stress of in my head.

[@digitaltolkien]

If it makes you feel any better, I said it wrong for decades :-)

[@lore_house]

Same

[@voodoochild1975az]

For me it borders on creepy how well Sindarin sounds like.... How I would expect Elves to speak. It's like the language Tolkien created tapped into the collective unconscious of what such a thing would sound like.

[@rahilario]

Finally a youtuber puts out an actual important video against the tide of horrid mispronunciations

[@syrianspitfire4981]

Great video! I am Brazilian and the pronunciation of elvish words is actually quite simillar to portuguese in some ways, much more than english. I just noticed I was saying a lot of names right just by saying as a portuguese speaker would

[@digitaltolkien]

Yes, English is very bad example to follow and Romance languages are much better (especially Spanish for the vowels and also, as you discovered, Portuguese)

[@LoisoPondohva]

​@@digitaltolkien and, surprisingly, Russian. Except for the non-reduction of vowels. We don't use shwa a lot, but we love to turn Os into As in unstressed positions.

[@rursus8354]

Tolkien knew European languages and the original pronunciation, so he used a pretty Latin-like way to write words. It is not hard for non-English native people to "pronounce Tolkien's words as written". The only problem is that he sometimes used n for ŋ, such as in "Noldor" [ŋoldor].

[@digitaltolkien]

Yes, the whole n / ñ / ŋ thing is problematic (and definitely beyond what I was going for here).

[@monoverantus]

As a Swede, I concur; Elvish comes very naturally to us. One thing that did use to trip me up though, was that "ä" is an actual letter in Swedish, so it took a while to get used to seeing it as an "a" with a diaresis.

[@thearchivist31915]

In Helge Fauskanger's Quenya course, he says that's the original pronunciation (and that you can use a Ñ/ñ for ŋ) but by the Third Age, all ŋ sounds morphed into n sounds, though the tengwar still keep both glyphs separate.

[@EtherBotGames]

very big fan of this light almost pocketbook of tips

[@Spielkalb-von-Sparta]

That's a brilliant guidance! Coming from German language, most of the tips came naturally to me. But not always. Thanks a lot! And yes, I'd like you to make a more extensive video on this. Especially American guys tend to pronounce "Gandalf" with an prolonged "æ" at the start and a completely different pronunciation of the second "a". Maybe a list of the most common names of LotR and how to pronounce them would be helpful? (Edit: Subbed, liked and bell activated.)

[@rosie_gamgee]

Thank you so much, that was really helpful. Now I need to work on pronouncing 'Tolkien' correctly 😂

[@digitaltolkien]

Ironically “Tolkien” would be pronounced differently if an Elvish word (TOL-key-en) which is how I used to say it 😀

[@catilucia]

The dh combo is something I’m stuck on pronouncing correctly! thank you for this video

[@granite_4576]

The -dh is how we use it in Cornish, and I think the distinction from -th is something that would benefit modern English.

[@entwistlefromthewho]

The sounds are not necessarily the same between Quenya and Sindarin. Sindarin 'll' can be a long /l/ or a fricative like the Welsh 'll' /ɬ/ which depends entirely on etymology and impossible to tell from form (cheers Tolkien!) Also, Sindarin has three vowel lengths where the shortest is also a change in quality: e /ɛ/, é /e~eˑ/, and ê /eː/. Also, I'm not entirely certain that Sindarin and Quenya stress is the same, but I may be wrong on that. Regarding "Hobbit pronunciation" - Tolkien said that the hobbits' pronunciation of Elvish (Quenya or Sindarin) is basically how he expected most readers to mispronounce them - with final -e being pronounced as -ei as a major one he pointed out.

[@digitaltolkien]

Right, hence my comment right at the start that I could do a separate deep dive video if people were interested. My video wasn’t intended to be complete, just a few tips for people to help them avoid some common mistakes.

[@tomhillman9519]

Nice, James!

[@JaspersDadders]

A deep-dive into pronunciations would nice. I’ve been using Martin Shaw’s for years.

[@HighKingTurgon]

Rereading The Lord of the Rings after teaching for a few years, I realized: "oh. Elvish prosody is just Latin." Finally pronounced Eärendil correctly.

[@HighKingTurgon]

And Eressëa is a MINEFIELD

[@digitaltolkien]

yes, the stress rules are pretty much just Latin!

[@HighKingTurgon]

@@digitaltolkien I'm delighted you pointed it out; I missed it on previous rereads, but just noticed: "Merry, Pippin, and Bilbo kinda sucked at elvish, but Frodo was pretty good!" Absolutely incredible footnote.

[@digitaltolkien]

yeah, I love that footnote! there are few little sociolinguistic nuggets in Appendix E

[@brethilnen]

Very helpful

[@chadbornholdt9257]

On the difference between AI & AE, I always tell people this: AI is like a normal person saying "eye" & AE is like a Southerner (like myself) saying "eye"... We Southrons don't finish closing the back of our throats on AI diphthong words.

[@jonde664]

Awesome videos, keep them coming! I love the similarity of pronouncing vowels between elvish and Finnish

[@onevideotorulethemall]

I really enjoyed this

[@KimP0612]

Yea, deep dive into correct pronunciation. Maybe even a series on Rohan and it’s use of language.

[@cliveshergold9467]

So where is/are the stress(es) in Ainulindale? Shouldn't the last 'l' make the penultimate syllable stressed?

[@digitaltolkien]

the final l is part of the last syllable so the penultimate syllable is light: Ai-nu-lin-da-le and so the stress is on the antepenultimate syllable: Ai-nu-LIN-da-le

[@noahsarchangel]

Perhaps I’ve misunderstood or misheard you, but while pronouncing Eärendil, I thought I heard the il(eel)sound more like an “ill.” I just wanted to seek clarification on which was grammatically correct. Was it meant to be eel or ill?

[@digitaltolkien]

You haven’t misheard. I’m a little imprecise with my in that environment (my accent creeping in). Should be closer to eel.

[@noahsarchangel]

I appreciate that! It’s super cool learning more about the linguistics in Tolkien’s universe.

[@vixenoreos]

Can someone please tell me how to pronounce the elvish word rhiw? I'm making a game character a elf and I've picked the 2 words Vala (I think it means strength) and. Rhiw which means winter aka her name is strong winter (frost magic user)

[@digitaltolkien]

The RH is a voiceless (trilled) R. Sometimes I find it helpful to think of it as "HR" (which is what the equivalent in Quenya is). The W is likely an OO sound as if it were 'U'. If you just say HREEOO, you'll be pretty close. As well as Sindarin, rhiw also a Welsh word and the Welsh pronunciation (which you can find on Wikipedia) works pretty well for Sindarin too, I'd say :-) Hope this helps!

[@carlatate7678]

Why is it EH-ah-rehn-dihl and not eh-ah-REHN-dihl, as 'rend' must be a heavy syllable?

[@digitaltolkien]

It's definitely eh-ah-REHN-dihl. The primary stress is never on the fourth-to-last syllable although there's often a secondary stress there so the entire word is trochaic.