It's your day! Happy Birthday!

[Mithalwen]

Originally Posted by Formendacil

Regarding that, by the way, Blind Guardian, what you have identified as an "o" in "ioil" is actually a "đ" or "dh"--as in "Maedhros" or "Caradhras". At least... it is if I'm right in my understanding of that rather obscure symbol. It's a rare enough character that I can't seem to find a combination code, and I don't know its name to search it--I just know enough to know it exists.

It think it is the old English charachter "eth". Like ash, thorn, yogh, wynn and ethel they have usually disappeared from English. the only one that you might see is Thorn in what looks like Ye olde englishe tea shoppe and the like.... others are latent like the name Menzies being pronounced Mingies - z represents yogh not Z...

[Eönwë]

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.

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

It think it is the old English charachter "eth".

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...