New interview with Christopher Tolkien

[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.