Re: CHAT: Best/Worst/Missing Scenes in LotR

Christian Thalmann:
> --- In conlang@y..., Anton Sherwood <bronto@P...> wrote:
> > And Rosta wrote:
> > > But I did very much get the impression that the actors were carefully
> > > coached -- overcareful in some ways. Examples that caught my notice
> > > have fled my memory, but I noticed that when speaking English/Westron
> > > they used [i] in certain Elvish names which would more naturally have
> > > been said with [I] in English speech.
> >
> > Isildur being perhaps the most obvious.
>
> I don't quite understand why that bothered you.  To me, it makes the
> dialog even more convincing.
>
> Elrond, Aragorn and the others pronouncing Isildur correctly
For 'correctly' read 'as in the language they originate from'.

> enhances
> the impression that these people actually *know* and live with the
> Elven languages rather than just being actors forced to take these
> "annoyingly" pure vowels into their anglophone mouth.  ;-)
The more that foreign names are assimilated into -- are familiar to --
the language, the more that name's form corresponds to the native
phonology. There's a continuum -- e.g. _Christophe_ at the foreign
extreme in English could be [kXis'tof], as in French, or minimally
adapted to English phonemes, /kri:s'tQf/, or further adapted to
native phonotactics, /krIs'tQf/, or yet further adapted to native
stress preferences, /'krIstQf/. At the one extreme it is clearly
a French name being used in English speech; at the other extreme it
is clearly being treated as an English name -- a name that belongs
to English by adoption albeit not by origin. 'Eeseeldour' is too
close to the Foreign extreme and not close enough to the Native
extreme; it gives the effect that _Isildur_ is a name unfamiliar to
Westron.

> Wouldn't you prefer Patrick "/ZA:nlu:k pikA`:d/" Steward to pronounce
> his French lines like a Frenchman?  ;-)
I am a big appreciator of Star Trek except for The Original Series, especially
of J-L Picard, but I can maintain this appreciation only
by studiously ignoring all linguistic matters. However, I don't
understand Picard to be French, and in Series 1 of TNG French is
spoken of as an obsolete language. So no, I wouldn't prefer him to
speak French lines like a Frenchman.

--And.