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Originally Posted by Feanor of the Peredhil
To tag on to pretentious pronunciation... pretentious use of silent letters.
My old history teacher had a silent "t" in his name. I mean... who has a silent "t"? Silent vowels are forgivable, but when you enter the domain of not pronouncing a very obvious consonant... that's just too much.
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You have run headlong into the history of language. Names, especially place-names, are especially notorious for containing letters that once were, but are no longer, pronounced. This is nobody's fault, but it is the fault of the human language apparatus, namely, the tongue. The human tongue is basically a lazy thing, and insists on finding the easiest way around the words it wants to "spit out". Thus,
through, for example, is no longer said with an asperated (as in clearing one's throat) "gh"; so now the letters are "silent". So if to Mordor such silent letters go, so does the history of language itself, and the human tongue to boot! (eewww!) Just imagine all over Mordor, human tongues hopping around, finding the easiest way to say words.
