Happy Birthday
Ibri!
See, I got round all of the hard-to-pronounce-name discussion there.
Actually, speaking of which, I remember on one of the Barrow-Downs Skype calls we each tried to pronounce various things that were hard to say, and your name was one of them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mithalwen
It think it is the old English charachter "eth".
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Yes, it is lucky (for us), Tolkien was consistent in his use of thorns and eths, because in Old English they were used interchangeably (though usually a thorn would begin a word, e.g. "þæt" while an eth would be used in the middle of words, e.g. "æðel"). Here we always know that an 'ð' will signify the 'th' in 'that', while 'þ' is the 'th' sound in 'thank'.
However, now just looking at that and reading the
Ardalambion page on Valarin, I've realised that all this time I've probably been pronouncing it wrong, and it should probably in fact be pronouced: "pat-hân" instead of "pathan" (or "paþan") as I have been saying it until now.
Well, I suppose you should ignore the second line of my post then...
