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Gilraen
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Post -h pronounciations
on: October 22, 2002 12:45
How do you pronounce a consanent-h combination, such as lh, dh, rh, etc? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Naneth
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: October 22, 2002 03:04
Ch sounds like the "ch" in "Bach".
Dh sounds like the "th" in "these".
Hw sounds like a voiceless W.
Lh sounds like a voiceless L.
NG sounds like the "ng" in finger.
Ph sounds like the "f".
Rh sounds like a voiceless R.
Th sounds like the ''th" in "thin".

What do I mean by "voiceless" ??
"Voiced" refers to the buzzing sounds your vocal chords make when they vibrate. Try saying the word "buzz", and holding the z-sound for a long time. If you put your fingers on your throat while you do this, you can feel your vocal chords vibrating. "Voiceless" sounds, on the other hand, are made without vibrating your vocal chords. Try saying "bus", and drawing out the s-sound for a long time. Now if you feel your throat, you can tell that there is no vibration in your vocal chords, no "buzzing" feeling.

It might take a bit of practice to be able to get a voiceless R,L, or W !!
Gilraen
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: October 23, 2002 01:00
Thank you, Naneth!

I'm not having any problem with the voiceless sounds- should I be?
Fíriel
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: October 23, 2002 07:49
Hey, Naneth (or anybody else), since this thread's up, could a normal R in Sindarin be also referred to as a trilled R? This is more for tengwar purposes.
Naneth
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: October 24, 2002 01:41
Absolutely, definitely ......a "trilled" R !!
Gilraen
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: October 24, 2002 02:55
So that's why I have no problem with the voiceless r! I'm an American, and I/we don't roll rs. We talk so boring...
Naneth
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: October 24, 2002 03:31
LOL.......Yes we are boring, aren't we Gilraen !! But remember, you aren't supposed to feel a vibration in your vocal cords with the voiceless letters.....for some reason it is very hard for me to accomplish that unless I almost whisper.
Gilraen
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: October 25, 2002 09:22
Okay, now I'm having a problem with the voiceless r. I don't know why I couldn't feel the vibration before, but it's definately there now. Maybe you're supposed to almost whisper the sound, hence the name "voiceless"
rinquellewen
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: November 06, 2002 06:30
i have a real problem i am trying to learn the sindarin language but can not roll my tounge...this is not good...could anyone possible attempt to try and explain how to?? please!!!
Naneth
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: November 07, 2002 11:24
Heheh...I will TRY to explain it !! Hold your tongue to the roof of your mouth.....cup it a little....and breathe out hard and with the Rrrrrrrr sound at the same time !! Good luck !!
Tilmith
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: November 13, 2002 06:59
I have no problems what so ever with rolling sounds or "ich/bach"ones either. However I still don´t manage to get those voiceless ones right.

Being from northern Sweden is this supposed to be hard for me? is there other problems I might stumble on in learning Quenya?
Gildor-Inglorion
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: February 22, 2005 02:46
Well voiceless sounds should be nearly silent . Don't try too hard to pronounce them loudly!

Take English H for instance. In American English, at least, we don't have a voiced H sound. Because of this the actual "h" is nearly 100% silent. Just a faint whisper.

Try pronouncing the following for instance:

hat, here, him, horn

In each case the vowel is voiced but the H is never.

So the moral of the story... don't be afraid to make these sounds nearly inaudible . I think a lot of people have trouble with these because they expect them to be more evident when by their very nature they are not.
Uialdil_i_degilbor
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: February 23, 2005 02:14
The sounds rh and lh tend to be difficult for many people because voiceless liquids are not sounds found in most of the world's languages. English doesn't have them, but Welsh does. Try finding a site with sound bytes of Welsh pronunciation (I know they exist, but I don't know a URL right off the top of my head...) and listen the Welsh rh and ll: those are the same sounds as S rh and lh. Still have problems with their pronunciation? Well, take solace in the fact that they are not frequent sounds in Sindarin, so you won't have to tackle them very often.

[Edited on 25/2/2005 by Uialdil_i_degilbor]
WhiteCat
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: February 24, 2005 02:19

Try pronouncing the following for instance:

hat, here, him, horn

In each case the vowel is voiced but the H is never.


English does have some instances of voiced [h], though it is not a phoneme on its own grounds: the most obvious example that comes to my mind is ahead.
Gildor-Inglorion
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: February 25, 2005 10:39
Mmm, very good point WhiteCat. I had forgotten about that slight twist.
Beren_Elaran
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: February 27, 2005 05:02
I've always pronounced lh and rh as "hl" and "hr" -- the way they are spelled in Quenya. Basically, I add an h sound before the l or r, which loses its voice because of the proximity to the voiceless initial h. As far as I know (and please correct me if I'm wrong) Sindarin lh and rh are pronounced the same as Quenya hl and hr, just with a different Romanized spelling. So.. is my way of pronouncing these sounds a) universal among all Elvish tongues, b) used only in Quenya, or c) totally wrong? I studied H.F.'s Quenya course before I started learning Sindarin, and he says that by the Third Age, the hl and hr sounds in Quenya had merged with the voiced liquids. I quote:
In the transcription and spelling employed in this course, the former presence of "lost" distinct consonants is reflected in two cases only: hl and hr, that were originally unvoiced l and r, but later they merged with normal l, r (and are therefore not included on the list of Third Age Quenya consonants above). Thus we will spell, say, hrívë ("winter") in this way despite the fact that Tolkien imagined the typical Third Age pronunciation to be simply "rívë" (with a normal r).

Did something similar occur in Sindarin? I would think that, Sindarin being the common tongue of most of the elves of Middle-Earth by the Third Age, more changes would have occured in Sindarin than in Quenya. And if, through the elves' loving and careful preservation of their treasured language, such changes did not occur in Sindarin, how is it that the elves neglected to keep the same sounds in Quenya, which was supposedly an even more ancient, revered, and (by the Third Age) mainly ceremonial language? The only answer that I can think of is that the sounds hl and hr in Quenya were not the same as Sindarin lh and rh. Any thoughts?
Eluned
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: March 01, 2005 12:31
As Uialdil-i-degilbor suggests, you can hear how Welsh ll and rh are pronounced in sound clips on websites.

For ll go to http://www.menai.ac.uk/clicclic/lesson2-1.htm, go towards the bottom of the page and click on the question "Lle dach chi'n byw?" to hear the first sound.

For rh go to http://www.menai.ac.uk/clicclic/lesson5-1.htm, down to the "Vocabulary and phrases" section and click on "rhywun"( / someone), again to hear the first sound.

In case you're wondering, these pages are parts of an on-line course in the spoken Welsh of North Wales.
Fíriel
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: March 01, 2005 12:53
And if, through the elves' loving and careful preservation of their treasured language, such changes did not occur in Sindarin, how is it that the elves neglected to keep the same sounds in Quenya, which was supposedly an even more ancient, revered, and (by the Third Age) mainly ceremonial language?


IMHO, LH & RH are the same as HL and HR, and I believe there's a passage in the Appendices that says something to that effect. Besides, there have been more changes in Quenya than you think , and this is especially well-reflected in the tengwar, such as TH to S as mentioned in the Shibboleth (think Míriel Serindë instead of Míriel Therindë), and the change of the Z to an R sound, remaining only in a few names such as Ezellohar.

(Quenya scholars might be better informed than me regarding this. ^_^)

[Edited on 1/3/2005 by Fíriel]
Beren_Elaran
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: March 08, 2005 07:03
IMHO, LH & RH are the same as HL and HR


Helge Fauskanger seems to be of the same opinion. In his essay, "On LH and RH (not to mention HL and HR)", he writes,

Another change, affecting a great number of words, involves the sounds that in Tolkien's Roman spelling of Noldorin/Sindarin are normally expressed by the digraphs lh and rh. In Quenya, the same sounds are normally spelt hl and hr. This is unvoiced L and R, sc. (dental) L and (trilled) R pronounced without vibration in the vocal cords. What Tolkien had in mind was evidently what may be described as "whispered" variants of normal Elvish L and R. In English, unvoiced l occurs only as a variant of normal l. (For instance, the l of please will normally be unvoiced; contrast the voiced l of lease - to borrow an example from An Introduction to Elvish.) But in Sindarin and Quenya, these unvoiced sounds are phonemes in their own right.


So it seems that LH and RH were pronounced the same way as Quenya HL and HR, but this also means that my way of pronouncing the voiceless liquids (adding an "h" sound before the l or r) is almost certainly not correct. :rolleyes: Oh, well.

One other matter which may be pertinent here: that of Quenya and Sindarin HW -- which is (I think) is the same sound heard in English words like "whale" (at least when spoken by people with impeccable diction). Does the W just become unvoiced, or are there two separate phonemes present, [h] and [w]? Webster's New World dictionary spells the English equivalent of this sound (hw) but doesn't list this digraph as a separate phoneme in the pronunciation key. So we can assume that in Sindarin, HW was treated as two separate phonemes...as long as the HW is pronounced the same as WH in English.

Tolkien, being a linguist, would have wanted to have some rhyme and rheason behind the rhomanizations of his constructed languages. The different spellings of the voiceless L and R in Sindarin versus Quenya would indicate, then, that the order of the two letters of the digraph is somewhat arbitrary, that the H is only present to indicate loss of voicing, and that the two letters are not to be treated as distinct sounds. The consistent spelling of HW throughout both Elvish tongues may indicate that this consonant cluster contains two phonemes, though such a conclusion would be far from justifiable with only the evidence I've given here.

Anyway, here's a link to the "LH and RH" article...probably many of you have already read it, but I'll put it out there just in case .
http://www.uib.no/people/hnohf/lh-rh.htm
Lambengolmo
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: March 09, 2005 12:17
English (and probably therefore also Q&S ) is a separate phoneme (/ʍ/, an unvoiced labio-velar fricative) rather than a combination /hw/.
Uialdil_i_degilbor
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: March 09, 2005 06:48
There are several regional pronunciations of E. wh. Tolkien used Received Pronunciation when he spoke. RP doesn't differentiate between w and wh: he pronounced 'wit' and 'whit' identically. However, that is obviously not what he had in mind for Q & S hw.He states explicitly that it is pronounced as Northern English wh. This is represented in IPA by a single sign: an upside-down w. It is a single phoneme: voiceless w. (HTML won't allow me to type the IPA symbol here, but for those of you who have Unicode fonts with IPA extensions, the code for typing it is alt + 028D [or for those of us who use decimal codes, alt + 0653]).
Lambengolmo
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: March 09, 2005 07:22
You can use IPA Extensions here. (əpoɔıun ɹoɟ ʎɐɹooɥ )

If you can't see the symbols then it's your browser, not the board itself.
Uialdil_i_degilbor
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Post RE: -h pronounciations
on: March 10, 2005 10:36
You can use IPA Extensions here. (əpoɔıun ɹoɟ ʎɐɹooɥ )

If you can't see the symbols then it's your browser, not the board itself.


Okay, I can see them using Opera (though the IPA symbols are out of line with the regular Latin letters), but not Internet Explorer (which is what I normmally use).
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