I say Cirith you say Kirith
 

I was looking through my RoTK Book at the Apendexes and i got to the huge fold out map,
and on it under Cirith Ungol it had Cirith spelt Kirith, i was just wondering if this was a misprint

By the way, my book is...

The Return of the King, Second edition, Houghton Mifflin Company Boston

Tolkien sometimes, but not throughout, used the 'phonetical' spelling of < Kirith >. I am not sure when he wanted it to be < Kirith >, or when he and others revised that; but it does not matter very much since it is just a translation from Elvish into Latin letters anyway.

[ November 28, 2002: Message edited by: Sharkû ]

From reading his Letters I got the impression that Kirith with a K was the way he spelled it while writing the book, and he changed it to C in one of his post-completion revisions whilst preparing it for publishing. I recall that Christopher didn't want him to do it because he felt that everyone would pronounce it "Sirith" as a result. I don't remember what Tolkien's exact reason was and why he didn't follow Chris's advice.

Diamond, you're right - in HoME it's spelled Kirith Ungol pretty much the entire time; whenever it was exactly that he decided to change it to Cirith, it must have been very, very late in the process, possibly even just before the book was ready to be printed. I don't know why he changed it to a C, but my hypothesis would be that it was because he based so much of the ME languages (the non-Elvish ones; Rohirric and so forth) upon Anglo-Saxon and its variants. According to Sweet's Primer, Anglo-Saxon had no K, instead, the letter C was always treated as hard. Using K may just have felt "anachronistic" to him. Though of course that wouldn't explain the spelling of the name Kalimac, would it [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]. (Calimac just isn't the same, somehow...)

yeah, I always used to say/think Sirith, Sirdan, Selebrian, etc.

'Seleborn' is probably one of my worst personal favourites. am i the only person that is driven stark-raving-mad by mis-pronunciation?

Not at all Atariel, I am as well. Especially when it´s about LotR. And of course I really dislike it when I discover I have been pronouncing things in the wrong way myself. Though that doesn´t often happen anymore, as I have read the Appendixes a lot of times...
(Can you understand my fury when Cate Blanchett pronounced "Eärendil" wrong?!)
I usually go round correcting people if I hear them pronouncing things wrong, but then, maybe it´s just me...

steve - I discovered that myself once when looking in a book, and though something was wrong. Nice to have at least some sort of explanation. [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]
Personally I prefer Cirith, Celeborn and Cirdan and so on, to Kirith, Keleborn and Kirdan, because it looks better, more aestethic (I hope that is the right word), and I remember reading Tolkien did as well.

[ November 29, 2002: Message edited by: Eärendil ]