New interview with Christopher Tolkien

[TheGreatElvenWarrior]

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

I like Lee's work - certainly better than just about anyone's save Tolkien's own and Pauline Bayne's which is a different style - but I don't need them. I find the word pictures quite vivid.

I, myself, watched the PJ version of Tolkien before reading the books. At the time I was perfectly satisfied with his interpretation -- I do not feel the same way anymore. I like Alan Lee's artwork. I also like John Howe's. I own four ME maps that were painted by John Howe and they are quite beautiful. Despite this, I find the longer it has been since I watched the films, the more I have a different visual of ME than was shown, and surprisingly, I like mine better. PJ was able to get people on his team that were talented in making the visual ME, but he botched it in the character and scripting department.

Christopher Tolkien has a right to be disappointed. He was there when his father was writing, after all. He probably knows better than anyone else alive what J.R.R.'s vision was for his works. Without Christopher Tolkien, we would know hardly anything about Middle-earth and its history.

[davem]

This is a brief excerpt from a recording made at Church House Bookshop back in 1981, launching the BBC Radio adaptation of Lord of the Rings. Its a short piece, where Brian Sibley goes into the contribution Christopher made to the series, & references the tape recording CT made as a pronunciation guide for the actors.

About 5 seconds of silence before the audio starts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5spIP...ature=youtu.be

[jallanite]

This tape is welcome here, at least to me.

Christopher Tolkien’s pronunciation of Thengel (using International Phonetic Alphabet symbols) as Then[dʒ]el where his father pronounced it as The[ŋɡ]el stands out as an odd differing pronunciation. It is probably not an error by either of the Tolkiens but would indicate different theories of how the Old English name may have been pronounced, and possibly theories of how the name was pronounced in different dialects of Old English.

Old English grammars, at least those that I have seen, get vague in their rules for words which contain ng. See http://www.lotrplaza.com/archive7/fo...asp?TID=234771 for a discussion which in its later sections, towards the top, gets into Christopher Tolkien’s pronunciation. Another possible pronunciation is The[nj]el. It is noted in the forum I have linked to that Tolkien preferred to pronounce the name Hengest as something like Hen[dʒ]est or Hen[j]est where other systems of Old English pronunciation prefer He[ŋɡ]est.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

The problem there is that in attempting to reconstruct ancient pronunciations, we rarely have much to go on besides what we can deduce from the sound-patterning of the language's surviving verse, whether rhyme, assonance, or alliteration; and that doesn't help much with medial consonants and consonant-pairs.

Occasionally orthography helps, as a sound-shift can be traced in a spelling change over time and/or colloquial spellings; but that's no help with -ng since there wouldn't have been an alternate orthography, "J" not existing in OE (except as an alternate written form of the vowel "I")

So -ng is really anybody's guess, depending on whether one wants to use "frog DNA" from mod. German, or from Dutch-Frisian which is a closer cousin. FWIW, I'm disposed to think that dzh- in English, spelled either J or G, is a French import. But I certainly have no evidence to back up my gut there.

[jallanite]

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[dʒ]e and engel (‘angel’) is pronounced as en[dʒ]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.

[Mithalwen]

Doesn't Christopher explain his choice? It is a bit indistinct but I have heard this before and I thought he did.. but not having done much (ie virtually no) AS it didn't sink in.

I don't suppose it is at all relevant that west midlands accents now tend to sound ng closer to separate consonants than the IPA hooked n sound - sin-ging

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by jallanite

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[dʒ]an and engel (‘angel’) is pronounced as en[dʒ]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.

You're rather missing the point. The absence of J in A-S is relevant to the extent that there was no alternate orthography for G which might shed light on the issue, unlike, say ME G-W.

That ng is sometimes pronounced [ndʒ] in Old English is given by many pronunciation guides.. By many, yes, but not all: that's the point- we really don't know and it's a matter of deduction. (Dotted G of course is a modern convention, not found in the sources)

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

Doesn't Christopher explain his choice? It is a bit indistinct but I have heard this before and I thought he did.. but not having done much (ie virtually no) AS it didn't sink in.

No he didn’t really explain it. Brian Sibley noted that he had written back to Christopher Tolkien pointing out that J. R. R. Tolkien had used the pronunciation The[ŋɡ]el which he felt sounded better than The[ndʒ]el and that Christopher Tolkien indicated that the change was acceptable to him. He provided no reason. Perhaps this is an Old English word of disputed pronunciation or perhaps Christopher Tolkien realized that he had perhaps mispronounced it.

Sibley then suggested that perhaps J. R. R. Tolkien was intending to give the name in genuine Rohirric as opposed to genuine Old English. That seems to me to be most improbable. Thengel is a genuine Old English name. It is also one that seems to me to be equally possible to be read either way in both Old English and Modern English.

I will see what I can find out from reputable sources.

I don't suppose it is at all relevant that west midlands accents now tend to sound ng closer to separate consonants than the IPA hooked n sound - sin-ging

Not that I can see. Christopher Tolkien quite definitely reads The[ndʒ]el, not something like The[ŋɡɡ]el or The[ng]el. And what he reads is one of the two pronunciations possible for the word under pronunciation guides which recognize both pronunciations as possible for ng in Old English as in Modern English.

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

You're rather missing the point. The absence of J in A-S is relevant to the extent that there was no alternate orthography for G which might shed light on the issue, unlike, say ME G-W.

Well, I now get what you were trying to indicate.

That ng is sometimes pronounced [ndʒ] in Old English is given by many pronunciation guides.

. By many, yes, but not all: that's the point- we really don't know and it's a matter of deduction.

Of course it is to some extent a matter of deduction. That is not the same as indicating that one deduction is as good as another (which indeed you don’t actually say). The two pronunciations [ndʒ] and [ŋɡ] for ng are found in more than one source and one of each is supported by one of the two Tolkiens, who were both experts in Old English.

Your gut belief that [dʒ] is not found in Old English has, as yet, no support from a trustworthy Old English pronunciation guide. The indications I have found give [dʒ] as only occurring in Old English following [n], which fits with Christopher Tolkien’s pronunciation.

Is it possible that when shown that your belief that [dʒ] probably did not occur in Old English conflicts with definite statements that it does, following [n], that you are now attempting to claim that because these are only deductions, they aren’t necessarily so but that your gut feeling has more likelihood if being true? At the moment, I don’t accept that. I want something better.

(Dotted G of course is a modern convention, not found in the sources)

Your information on dotted ġ was already indicated by me as I wanted to make it clear what was meant by “dotted ġ″in the passage I was linking to. You should read posts more carefully before answering.