New interview with Christopher Tolkien

[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.

[Aiwendil]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

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.

But, regardless of the pronunciation of 'ng', isn't it rather generally accepted that 'cg' was pronounced [ʤ]? (As in 'ecg' - modern English 'edge' - for example).

[William Cloud Hicklin]

OK, my gut willingly stands corrected: OE ecg absolutely has the soft g, and so my categorical exclusion is simply wrong.

Perhaps I was misrecalling the suggestion that [dʒ] for "J", specifically, was a French import.




Of course, JRRT also moved a bit between theory and practice himself: in his recordings he invariably pronounces the final consonant of Gandalf [f] while himself averring that in 'proper' Norse it would be [v].

[jallanite]

Searching though websites and library books has convinced me that most authors just don’t bother to cover ng, but that those who do all give the two values of [ŋɡ] when the g has the hard sound and [ndʒ] when the g has the soft sound, and everyone seems to agree that Old English cg is to be pronounced [dʒ].

See http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resour...unciation.html which in I have already linked to and which covers the entire book Introduction to Old English by Peter S. Baker (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). There were about four copies on the shelves, which is an unusual number of copies of the same book for the main branch of the University of Toronto Library.

Then there is http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm which is the Omniglot site of Old English/Anglo-Saxon.

Last is http://weofodthignen.livejournal.com/158550.html which says:

Although g after n is usually sounded g, occasionally (e.g. sprengan, ancestor of "spring") it is instead j as in "edge," but shorter than in cg words.

None of this indicates how this is thought to be known, but perhaps that is because it is too obvious. Middle-English generally adopted the same spelling system as Old English, but simplified and modified it to mostly follow the Norman French spelling system. In particular the early Middle-English writers had introduced the French version of the letter g, but also kept as a letter of the alphabet a descendant of the Old English version of the alphabet. This letter is now usually known as yogh and was written something like Ȝ/ȝ. (You may not be able to see it here if you have an old computer, in which case you can see from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogh what it sometimes looked like.)

Middle-English writers generally used the letter gee (G/g) to transcribe the sounds of gee as it existed in Norman French. The French letter G/g is believed to have then had two sounds, a hard sound [g] like the hard sound of G/g in Modern French and English and Old English as well as a soft sound [dʒ] heard in Modern English and Old French but seldom if at all in Old English. The ḟormer Old French [dʒ] has since softened still further and is now [ʒ].

Middle-English writers generally used the letter yogh (Ȝ/ȝ) to transcribe the sounds of Middle-English gee which were assigned to gee in Old English but differed from the French sounds, namely [j] (the sound used in Modern English for consonantal Y) and [ɣ] which is a sound that has since become lost in English or is fronted to [f] but is now sometimes spelled as gh, for example in tough, though, cough, draught, laugh, straight, tough, plough, thorough, and in other words.

In short, the linguists are assuming that if an early Middle-English scribe is using the letter G/g rather than Ȝ/ȝ, it must be because the sound to be represented is either [g] or [dʒ]. Therefore the Old English values must have been the same or very close to one of these choices. So when the scribes put down G/g and not Ȝ/ȝ, cg must have been pronounced as [dʒ] and Old English ng, if not to be pronounced as [ŋɡ], must be pronounced as [ndʒ].

However the closest I have come to finding verification of this theory is from Henry Sweet’s famous book A History of English Sounds (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, Oxford: 1888). Sweet uses Bell’s Visible Speech characters which cannot be reproduced over the web. I have replaced them by approximate IPA values in curly braces, although in this case the values don’t make sense to me and I believe they may be in error. On page 196 Sweet writes:

744. OE ġ becomes ȝ everywhere in ME, except in the combination nġ and nċ, where {ɲɟ, ɟɟ} gradually developed into their present sound of (nʒ, dʒ) as in senġen, briġġe MnE (sinʒ, bridʒ) = OE sęnġan, bryċġ.

In short, if Thengel has a soft g then Christopher Tolkien’s pronunciation as Then[dʒ]el is a correct one according to current standards. I have found two modern listings which contain the noun þengel and present it as þenǵel, here using an acute accent to mark the soft sound. One of the volumes was J. B. Passenger’s A Short Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon Poetry: In normalized Early West-Saxon (University of Toronto, Toronto: 1962). My notes are not in order on the other book, but I recall that it was in German.

However at least some earlier sources indicate the hard sound for þengel. See http://www.bosworthtoller.com/031660 for the page on þengel from Bosworth-Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary of 1898. According to the pronunciation guide at the centre top of the page the word is pronounced /θeŋɣel/. I cannot account for the vowel /ɣ/ but at least this is closer to J. R. R. Tolkien’s pronunciation. It suggests that the pronunciation provided by J. R. R. Tolkien was not simply an inexplicable error.

There the matter stands at the moment. Possibly some newer discussion has indicated that the g in Thengel had a soft sound or possibly this is a matter which is still in common debate.

Note, in many hard fonts in use in the 20th century the yogh symbol appeared in a from identical or almost identical to ʒ. Indeed it was often thought they were simply different forms to the same symbol. This was incorrect and in Unicode ȝ is usually now clearly distinguished from ʒ in fonts. Yogh sometimes appears in the HoME series and there it appears in a form indistinguishable from ʒ.

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Of course, JRRT also moved a bit between theory and practice himself: in his recordings he invariably pronounces the final consonant of Gandalf [f] while himself averring that in 'proper' Norse it would be [v].

Tolkien nowhere mentions ″proper Norse”. In Appendix E I Tolkien writes:

F represents f, except in at the end of words, where it is used to represent the sound of v (as in English of): Nindalf, Fladrif.

But this is an account of the pronunciation of the Quenya and Sindarin Elvish tongues, except in a few cases where Tolkien thinks fit to explicitly bring in one of the other languages. The discussion begins with Tolkien stating:

The Westron or Common Speech has been entirely translated into English equivalents. All Hobbit names and special words are intended to be pronounced accordingly: for example Bolger has g as in bulge, and mathom rhymes with fathom.

In Appendix F I Of Other Races – Dwarves, Tolkien writes:

Gimli’s own name, however, and the names of all of his kin, are of Northern (Mannish) origin. Their own secret and ‘inner’ names, their true names, the Dwarves have never revealed to anyone of alien race. Not even on their tombs do they inscribe them.

The name Gandalf is to be understood as one of these Northern names which Tolkien has substituted for the real Northern names, just as he supposedly substituted Old English names of the real Rohirric names, and invented Hobbit names to replace real their real names. These supposedly substitute Dwarvan names are taken from the Norse Eddas and some of them are somewhat Anglicized. Notably the name Dwalin in the Old Norse sources is Dvalin.

All these Northern names are to be understood as English-related substitutes for the the real names of the persons mentioned. In his essay on the Istari in Unfinished Tales Tolkien writes:

Gandalf is a substitution in the English narrative on the same lines as the treatment of Hobbit and Dwarf names. It is an actual Norse name (found applied to a Dwarf in Völuspá) used by me since it appears to contain gandr, a staff, especially one used in ‘magic’, and might be understood to mean ‘Elvish wight with a (magic) staff’. Gandalf was not an Elf, but would be by Men be associated with them, since his alliance and friendship with Elves was well-known. Since the name is attributed to ‘the North’ in general, Gandalf must be supposed to represent a Westron name, but one made up of elements not derived from Elvish tongues.

In short, Gandalf was never considered by Tolkien when he wrote the bit about f at the end of names, nor should he have been. Like the Dwarves he bears a name understood to be adapted to Weston both in the original imagined tale and in the English translation.

[Galin]

The Appendices also note...

The 'outer' or Mannish names of the Dwarves have been given Northern forms, but the letter-values are those described.

And 'those described' would appear to point back to what was said about F, indicating a final -v sound in Gandalf as in Old Norse (if one assumes the name Gandalf is to be included here anyway).

Yet...

The still more northerly language of Dale is in this book seen only in the names of the Dwarves that came from that region and so used the language of the Men there, taking their 'outer' names in that tongue.

Here 'only' is interesting. While Gandalf as representing a Westronized form makes some sense to me, in my opinion technically the account in Unfinished Tales refers to the name as representing Westron, attributed to the North 'in general'.

Still leaving Gandalf with a final -f sound.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

In short, Gandalf was never considered by Tolkien when he wrote the bit about f at the end of names, nor should he have been. Like the Dwarves he bears a name understood to be adapted to Weston both in the original imagined tale and in the English translation.

Why do you persist in ascribing to me statements I've never made and opinions I've never advanced? OF COURSE the bit on terminal F in App F refers to the Elvish tongues.

"Adapted to Westron" is all well and good- except that Westron nowhere appears in the book (save a couple of "actual" hobbit-names presented in App F); the CS is feigned to have been turned into English.

However, Gandalf is not an English name, not even an Old English name. Tolkien is just being inconsistent (or nonrigorous). He could after all make mistakes! Just recall the self-created mess he had to dig himself out of regarding Thror-Thrain.

--------------------------


Just perhaps related -although I have no idea what JRRT's scholarly opinion was on the matter - might be the theory that in at least some regional OE pronunciations no distinction was made between voiced and unvoiced fricatives: [s] and [z], [f] and [v] were interchangeable (think of the slightly but not wholly stagey "Zummerzet" accent)