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Old 09-20-2012, 04:31 PM   #74
jallanite
Shade of Carn Dûm
 
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Toronto
Posts: 479
jallanite is a guest of Tom Bombadil.
That J did not exist in Old English is irrelevant. My only use of the letter is as the International Phonetic Alphabet character [j] which is sounded like consonantal Y in modern English.

But -ng- is in at least some Old English words pronounced as [ŋ] as in Latin. Some such words are longe (‘long’), cyning (‘king’), song (‘song’) with ng pronounced [ŋ]. But singe (‘I sing′) is considered to have been pronounced as sin[]e and engel (‘angel’) is pronounced as en[]el, similar to modern angel.

For many words which exist in Middle English and Modern English the post-Old English forms are a great help.

That ng is sometimes pronounced [ndʒ] in Old English is given by many pronunciation guides. See, for example, http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resour...unciation.html , where it is stated:
Dotted ġ is usually pronounced [j], as in Modern English yes, but when it follows an n it is pronounced [ʤ], as in Modern English angel.
Dotted ġ only appears in some modernizations of Old English text to distinguish soft g from hard g. The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol [ʤ] was a former variant covering the two symbols [dʒ] but is now obsolete in official IPA usage. In current procedure one might use [d͡ʒ] if one wants to indicate specifically that [dʒ] represents a single phoneme.

Christopher Tolkien’s pronunciation is indeed one possible pronunciation of the name Thengel following modern theories reconstructing Old English. It is not a French import. I do not know the bases for this decision.

Last edited by jallanite; 09-20-2012 at 08:31 PM.
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