[jallanite]

Originally Posted by narfforc

The language of Tolkien's Dwarves (Khuzdul) was based on Semitic Languages, which sound nothing like Goidelic (Scottish Gaelic). Most Scottish people speak English accentuated by their mother tongue, so if Gimli had spoken Common Speech/English it should have in fact sounded maybe a little Jewish.

Adûnaic, the language from which the Common Speech derived, was also derived from triliteral roots like the historical Semitic languages. So perhaps Aragorn should have also sounded a little Jewish. Or perhaps he should have sounded a little Arabic, or a little Maltese. So presumably should Frodo and almost everyone. Probably not.

Nor is there one Jewish accent only. What is commonly thought of as “the Jewish accent” by Britons and North Americans is the English accent of German Jews, Ashkenazic Jews. But even when these Jews speak Hebrew (rather than Yiddish), the phonemic structure of their language is much influenced by German. But in Europe, the Sephardic Jews, the Jews of Spain and Portugal, are very common, and their own language is not Yiddish but Ladino, derived mainly from Old Castilian (Spanish) and Old Portuguese, with many borrowings from Turkish, and to a lesser extent from Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and French. The modern Hebrew most in accord with Classical Hebrew is that of the Yemenite Jews which is most like Arabic. The English accents of all three groups of Jews and the English accents of various other sorts of Jews are very different.

Tolkien does not give enough information on any of his languages to allow a reader to more than vaguely guess what accent would be used by a speaker of the language in modern English.

Goidelic languages (and Welsh and Breton) do share with Hebrew, against English, the feature of consonant modification, so it is not true that Hebrew sounds “nothing like Goidelic (Scottish Gaelic)”. And as to accents, English with an Irish accent is as Goidelic as Scots, but the English accents of speakers who natively speak an extreme form of Irish English and Scots English are not much alike.

Accents are too subtle to allow for much guessing.

Tolkien pretends to translate the Common Speech, as spoken by the upper classes of the Shire, into Standard English. He represents the speech of the lower classes of the Shire by including features mostly common to the so-called “lower classes” of Oxford and of Birmingham where he grew up and has the Elves and Gondorian nobility speak a more archaic form of English, but otherwise does not represent accents.

That the Dwarvish names, as purportedly translated, are mostly Old Norse, might suggest that Gimli’s accent should be Norwegian or Icelandic. But, although I don’t much like the films, Scottish seems to me to be good enough in at least suggesting a difference from the more standard English of the other characters.