Ardhon Ellammath - Realm of the Elf-languages

Sindarin was created as a language of Gaelic kind and thus covers many sounds that occur in languages like Welsh or Irish or languages of the Germanic neighbours like Anglosaxon or German. The descriptions given here mainly use examples from modern British English (the so-called Received Pronunciation) but not seldom one has to take a closer look at different dialects and languages. For this reason this phonology-guide provides sound-files that allow you to listen to a few words that use the sound discussed in different positions.
It should be noted that the examples given here are intentionally a little exaggerated, especially concerning vowels. This is just for maximum clarity. For normal and (as I hope) realistic and 'living' pronunciation see the Corpus Soundfiles.

For these files Real Player format is used. A free download of the latest version can be found here.
You will need free Gentium font to see some of the linguistic symbols.

Sindarin of Third Age has six different vowels and six diphthongs. More archaic Sindarin makes use of a seventh vowel, while the archaic dialect of northern Beleriand used yet another one. Most of these appear in our corpus in three different lengths:

- short vowels: represented by normal letters like a, u or œ
- long vowels: the same letters with an acute accent above. For example: é, ó or ý
- extra-long vowels: they make use of a circumflex accent, see â, î or ô

It should be noted that while long é and ó are in Quenya different in sound from short e and o there are no changes in Sindarin. Long vowels always have the same value as the short ones (which is not easy and may not be 100% correct in my recordings, because my first language German is like Quenya in this respect). In the following examples I try to demonstrate this as precisely as possible. The examples given in English (or other languages) only aim for the value and are not necessarily ment to represent length as well, for this the audio-files are meant:

The diphthongs (two vowels run together in one syllable) are in Sindarin allways falling. That means the first vowel is to be stressed and glides into the second. All other but the mentioned vowelcombinations are not dipthongal and are thus to be pronounced in distinct syllables (so one may wish to clearly mark them as non-diphthongal by using diaresis: Galadriël, Moriä, but this is seldom done at Sindarin [but very common when writing Quenya]). The diphthongs are:

In many cases Tolkien used different ways of transcribing sounds, especially consonants. In this list I try to cover all the known ways of transcription or at least to mention them.
A personal problem of mine is that I find it hard to pronounce unvoiced stops (t, k, p) without breathing them, because this is actually what these letters are mostly pronounced like in my first language. So what I give here will likely be too breathed for Elvish stops, but is rather what Tolkien represented by th, kh and ph in transcription of ancient Elvish and Khuzdûl. I hope the reader will overlook this impreciseness.

Consonants that are written twice are to be pronounced longer, just like vowel-length is shown by adding diacritics.
Long f is normaly transcribed ph. Also note, that pronouncing mm as long m is rather archaic, in Third Age Sindarin it was to be pronounced just like m.

ammen, ennyn, mellon, añ ñîl, Lossoth, aphad, Rochirrim

Some notes:
· It is not known for sure how to pronounce final (postvocalic) w. We do know that the diphthong au is at the end of words written aw, but what about, say, maew? We find tiw as Tengwar transcription for tiw, and normally Tengwar are phonetic, but then Tolkien mentions that final au was even in Tengwar often transcribed aw...
So is it pronounced u or w...we just do not know.

· There may be one more consonant that is represented by ' and that is called a glottal stop. When g is lost due to lenition it is replaced by an apostrophe in transcription and we know that the same was marked by a so called gasdil in Tengwar writing. This happens mainly before vowels, in the beginning of words, the same position in which languages like German have glottal stops, so I believe that in fact Sindarin g is not lost through lenition but turned into a glottal stop.
That means we are still able to say if we have "the fortress" (i ost) or "the dread" (i gost > i 'ost): i ost, i 'ost

Stress

As Tolkien informs us, stress normally falls onto the first syllable in disyllabic words: amar, thala, suilad.

But when the word has more syllables than that the stress goes onto the second-to-last syllable if it is "long". It does count long when:

· it has long í or ú: anírad = an-ír-ad
· it has a diphthong: nelchaenen = nel-chae-nen
· it is "closed" (followed by a long or more than one consonants): erchammui = er-chamm-ui
(Always have in mind that for example th or ch are only one consonant!)

If none of this is actually the case, the stress falls onto the syllable before this one (third-to-last):

· niphredil = niph-red-il
· adanedair = ad-an-ed-air
· hwiniol = hwi-ni-ol

Tolkien mentions that extra long vowels (using circumflex) only occur in monosyllabic words (when stressed), but then we also find words like annûn or amrûn that are disyllabic. But these words all consist of one basic word plus a prefix, so I believe that they are in fact still treated as monosyllabics. This does not only mean the vowels are indeed overlong, it also means that the second syllable is to be stressed! (Tolkien tells us that in disyllabic words stress goes onto the first syllable in virtually every case, not in every case.) Hence for example Henneth Annûn , not Henneth Annûn (listen to catch the difference).

We find some names written with hyphen. Does this mean these words are to be pronounced as two distinct words? This would indeed have effect on stress: Gil-galad , but Gilgalad (listen to catch the difference).