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davem, by "marketing" I meant such things as adaptations with an audio component and/or settings of Tolkien songs, not simply telling people to pronounce things "your way"--things that actually make money off the notion that this adheres to Tolkien in the details.
And if we want to talk about making people feel like second class fans, pronunciation pedantry pales compared to, "You haven't read x?!?" (Although pronunciation is perhaps the most obvious form of this.) I first set out to read the Silm because people were telling me I still wasn't a true Tolkien fan yet.
You actually do have a very interesting point on the "reconstructed" pronunciations... it rather reminds me of how you're "supposed" to pronounce classical Latin and Greek. We all know that this may be nothing like how it's actually pronounced, but we agree on it for clarity's sake. This is also why I'm so intrigued by words like "Nargothrond," which are pronounced one way according to the "official" rules but always scan differently in the Lays. One is tempted to say that there are exceptions, even in Elvish, that we will never know about.
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