Actually, is the same as in English for words as "this". It's just the voiced version of the found in words like "math". And the use of is actually logic with German. Like in school "gymnasium". In German is often pronounced /y/. Oh yeah, I wrote /y/ because that's the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) letter for that sound. Which is reason 2 of why it makes sense. In IPA, "gymansium" would look something like /ɡʏmˈnaːzi̯ʊm/ (actually it's not exactly a /y/ but it's close enough… the /y/ sound is also found in French though).
The letter Y was borrowed from the Greek, Υ (minuscule υ). If I'm not mistaken, in modern Greek it's pronounced /i/ ('ee'), but in ancient Greek it was pronounced /y/ (German 'ü', French 'u' like in 'lune'). The letter y is still pronounced /y/ in German, Danish and some other languages. If you need help pronouncing it, try pronouncing 'i' while making an o-shape with your mouth. Also, about the th/dh, my understanding of pronunciation guides differs somewhat. 'th' is equivalent to /θ/, which is the sound of the 'th' in 'through', 'bath', 'ethanol', etc. 'dh' is pronounced /ð/, sort of like a soft 'th'. It does exist in English, and is equivalent to the 'th' in 'the', 'bathe', 'father', etc.
I've gotten a lot of comments on this subject on this video, but this is probably the most inclusive and easiest (for me, anyway) to understand. Thank you!
Faez R-C The entire Elvish language composed by Tolkien was based heavily on Greek and Latin, especially Greek. The resemblance is undeniable. The phonetics match Greek strikingly.
Tolkien was particularly well-versed in Old Germanic languages, especially Old English. In OE the letter encodes exactly the sound as the German letter . Moreover, the letter is derived from the Greek alphabet where it equally stands for this sound, it is called /ypsilon/ there. Last but not least it is also the symbol of the aforesaid sound in the IPA. I didn't quite understand what you mean by changing to , but phonetically there is not much of a difference between the two sounds. An /y/ is the same as an /i/ with the only difference that the lips aren't spread but rounded.
I speak Bulgarian and we use Cyrillic instead of Latin letters and the 'y' in Sindarin is pronounced exactly like in my language. We always roll the 'R's and put emphasis on different parts of the words which is why pronunciation is one of the easiest parts for me when learning Sindarin. Thank you so much for the video, the pronunciation definitely makes a difference and makes it sound more Elvish. :)
Yaass being Finnish is so great in these moments because it makes it so easy for me, for example the letter "I" is said exactly like "ee" so in Finnish its I not "ai" (thats how I would write how americans say I).. Wow this is so easy, I just read it.... Like I am reading my own language~~
a few years ago I looked at learning Finnish, it helped with my Elvish pronunciation a lot, Finnish is now my favourite real world language because of its similarities to Elvish, it just makes it all the more beautiful to me :)
Tolkien got inspiration from a few languages when creating elvish, and Finnish was major contributor, I imagine it was exactly in the pronunciation departement
I have studied German, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic, etc so all this pronunciation is easy to me too. Thank you for making these videos brother because you are cool and easily understood and you make it fun and easy. Again, Le hannon mellon!
Aiya! Awesome! When i was studying quenya I found your first video and now I am addicted about them all. Please, keep going with this videos, they are very interesting and incredibles. Greetings from Brazil! Tenn enomentielva.
OMG please make more videos,you've actually inspired me to learn Sindarin.I practice everyday now and really wanna get better. I've tried to read myself the courses but i don't know how to pronounce the words;Thats where you come in.Your videos are very educational and i would love to see more
I don't know if that helps you, but I speak german, and in german, the letters Y, E;Ü and I (as in machine) are very close relatives in their pronounciation. Actually, if you say the alphabet in german and come to Y, you will call it "üpsilon", which is close to the greek root word "epsilon". You have to understand that in german, the letters E and I stand very close to each other - they are distinguished by a certain form of mouth-modulation. On top of that, the letter Ü ist a mix of U and E in German, as if you spoke "ue" in one quick flow, and this is actually how you type it if your keyboard doesn't support umlauts. Umlauts are "mixed letters". So you can replace ü with ue if you need to, and you will get a better feeling for the equal emphasis on both letters in the combination.. Native english speakers often tend to give a little more emphasis to the u and less to the e (including you -.no offense, it's very common), since they see a U with dots. This is why you have the feeling that Ü is farther away from the e and its very close relative - y - , and closer to the letter u. However, they meet right in the middle, and once you know that, the vowel modulation will be closer to the I that you find in machine.
Andrew Eder Welcome. I like your videos and their calm style - very educational im my opinion. Great voice, too. You don't happen to sing, do you? Coming full circle to elvish: Because of the Umlaute rule, a lot of germans who try to say "mae govannen" will pronounce it "mä govannen". --> Ae = ä , oe = ö, ue = ü. < And about the y - : think of the word "syndicate" or "symbol". The Y in these words is veeery similar to the typical ü -umlaut in german.
As an Estonian, we pronounce all those letters just the same way as in sindarin so it comes really easy. i also speak a bit finnish and russian so learning a new language comes quite naturally to me. But i really love your videos. Im just a tad under 2years late with my comment. Keep it going anyways. best of luck!
Wow this video is from 2015. It's 2018 and I discovered it just now. It's an amazing video. The easiest to understand for me. I enjoyed it a lot. Thank you for this.
for Slovak people, like me, it's much easier, because we usually just read as we see. You in English usually don't read as you see so it's much harder for you to learn Elvish :) Love the video!
That's great dude! Thanks a lot. I'm from Brazil and it's so much easy for us ️to pronunciate when our main lenguage is Portuguese. Please keep doing this videos! Len hannon mellon nin.
The Sindarin Y gets its spelling from Old English and IPA. This sound, /y/ is actually very very close to /i/. It's identical except for the lips, which are pursed. That's why I tell people to make an /i/ in their mouth and a /u/ with their lips. The Gondorians can't pronounce this vowel, so they say their /y/s like /i/s, dropping the rounding (pursed lips) from the vowel. This actually happened in English - all front vowels became un-rounded. This is why the Old English word "kyn" is "kin" today. It also means that people are mispronouncing Éowyn's name. ;)
now i don't know Sindarin but in IPA and languages like Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish the symbol/letter *y* is pronounced like the *ü* in German, so maybe this is where the Latin transliteration of this sound in Sindarin came from replacing *y* with *i* is probably because these 2 sounds are pronounced at the same position in your oral cavity (they are both high front vowels and put together at the same position on an IPA chart) and what differentiates them is lip rounding, so they are not thaat different from the bit i just read on Wikipedia, *dh* probably sounds like the *th* in *the* in English while *th* is just like the *th* in *thin*, which is cool because in English you don't have this distinction in writing, both sounds are spelled with a *th*. so why *dh*? i guess that's because *th* is still used the same way for the same sound [θ] and *d* is the voiced counterpart of *t* so it makes sense to make *dh* [ð] the voiced counterpart of *th* (voicing also differentiates sounds like k-g, p-b and more noticeably s-z)
Tolkien was greatly inspired by Finnish and other languages Quenye High-Elf language has Finnish grammar and words the most.(there is lot of Germanic words in there too so not just Finnish) Sindarin is closer to Weilsh. I noticed Orc say "attack" in Hobbit movie and it was the same word in Swedish there. Also LotR has few things very close to Finnish Kalevala book which Tolkien Read in Finnish (and learned Finnish to read it in the original lamguage)
wow really? i have heard Finnish was a great inspiration for Quenya and Welsh Sindarin but i thought they were priori languages, i wouldn't expect there to be words borrowed from any natural (or not) languages. so do you know what the Swedish dub for the line "attack" is? it's still the same isn't it?
I suppose so I can't remember and there are actually lot of words borrowed from other languages. Few can have the same meaning and some same word but different meaning. Like here: www.sci.fi/~alboin/finn_que.htm#grammar There are some info for you. Don't read everything if you go lower you can find same meaning words written differently and words that are the same but mean different things
Ada-Erika , excuse me, but, in this link you sent, an association is made wrongly: they associate Finnish's "-tär", that is said to be a feminine ending, with the Quenya "-tar", that means "high/lord". The context is the comparation between the Kalevala's character Ilmatar with the Silmarillion character Ilúvatar. Take it just as an observation: (I do not know what means "Ilmatar", but) Ilúvatar is made of two Quenya roots --> "ilúve", that means "everything, all", and "atar" (and not "-tar"), that means "father". So, Ilúvatar could not have conection with Ilmatar, once it's meaning is "The All Father".
One good way to understand the U with an umlaut (or the Sindarin Y) is to say "EEEEEEEEE" with your lips shaped like you're trying to say "OOOOOOOOOO" (like oo in shoot). This is the pronunciation for the unlauted U in German and is probably why the notes you reference say what they did about pronouncing the Sindarin Y. Interestingly, in German the Y has a very similar sound. Words like "typisch" sound very much like, "tooooopisch." Thanks for the videos!
I love your voice and your subject knowledge. I can feel the passion you have for these topics despite the "nerdiness" as you put it. :P Seriously though, great videos man. If you are doing this for fun, then know you just made someone's day. Keep it up!
The "dth" sound that he's talking about does exist in English, it's actually a very common sound in words like the, they, them, there, those etc. The difference between the "th" in "thin" and the "th" in "their" is the voicing, if you pronounce "their" you'll feel a bit more vibration in your throat like how we distinguish the difference between f & v and s & z. It's actually a bit odd how English decided to represent the two sounds with one diagraph.
So the vowels are a lot like Spanish and Japanese pronunciations, thanks this is great. Didn't know the stuff about the syllables, I'm so excited to learn
kinda old n late to the party but you deff do a better job explaining than other videos I've found. usually its hard to hear the person because they are speaking A) to soft B) have some annoying music in the background or C) go to fast. so nice job and thank you
this was very useful! I have been learning Sindarin and had trouble understanding but this really helped! I loved your fists video it also helped. My friend and I are now learning Elvish together and its all thanks to you! Guren *glassui!
As a spanish speaker, the rolling Rs, the DH sound and the vowels and many more features are like spanish so it really sounds very similar and quite alike to me. Its actually easier to pronounce Sindarin than english for us.
The emphasis for Elvish words that are three or more syllables varies. If the last two syllables are connected by one or no consonants, the 3rd to last syllable gets the emphasis. If it is two or more consonants, then the 2nd to last gets the emphasis. However, one must keep in mind that in Sindarin and Quenya, the combos "th", "dh" and "nd" are expressed with one letter. So although is-IL-dur is how you would pronounce that name, EL-en-dil and VAL-an-dil follow the one consonant rule since "nd" is one letter in Quenya. The combo "mb" is one letter in Quenya, but not in Sindarin. So cel-eb-RIM-bor is probably the correct pronunciation of that name since it is Sindarin.
In some occasions the letter Y is actually pronounced Ü in German. For example Xylophon is pronounced Xülophon. I think in some Scandinavian languages, which are the languages Elvish is based on, it is also pronounced like ü.
Isnt Y and Ü said exactly the same way? I mean I am Finnish and Estonian and they both say them exactly the same. Its like it wouldnt matter if I wrote the estonian word "külaline" like "kylaline".. Because, its the same lol
+The5streetThe Yes, in some languages it's always pronounced ü. In German it is sometimes pronounced as ü, sometimes as i and in very rare occasions like the English y when it's the first letter of a word, as in "year".
The origin of this pronunciation is greek ! (In French we call it “greek i”) This letter : “υ” became “y” with the time and the modifications it brings but it stayed pronounced ü in german like it was in greek. I guess it’s the same for northern language? I’m not sure for this part ^^
Look at an IPA chart and click on the y. On wikipedia it should lead you directly to an audio file with an pronunciation example. [y] is the IPA way of writing a sound that equals the German ü (this sound exists in other languages, too. IPA is universal for all human languages) e.g. [ybə] (pronunciation) = (way of writing in German language)
It may help understand the phonetics and phonology of any other language (elvish in this case), by firstly take a look to your own phonetics! I had the chance to learn a bit of English phonetics at college (but there are also many apps that you can look for), which helped me get many of the things you very well explained! Thank you, really! I love languages in general and I also love getting nerdish with lotr's stuff hahaha
Oh, a little Q, does Galadriel take an accent of sth of the sort? Cause in the movie it's "Lady gaLAdriel", the stress of the word is in the second syllable, right?
Hey Andrew. Interestingly, I found when doing my research that whenever we see DH in Elvish, it is a soft TH sound like in Leather, rather than a stronger TH sound like in though.Cheers mate, keep up with these vids. I even credited you in my essay haha
About the "Y" being pronunced like"ü", it coyld be related somehow with Greek. Because if, in Greek, you put "O" and "Y" together , you have "OY". And in Greek this combination of letters sounds like "u".
OMG! we used to have cyrillic alphabet and the letter Y as Ü sound in soviet times. our country and language is of turkic origin and we used the letter Y to pronounce “ü” sound as in German. that’s just mind boggling. of course after the collapse of the union we switched back to latin alphabet ( yes we used latin before bolshevik invasion). but you saying you don’t understand Y as Ü and I do understand is just weird and phenomenal 👍🏻 great videos even 5 years later
I know this video is quite old by now but: /y/ is pronounced as /i/ but with rounded lips. So the tongue is held high and forward (like in /i/) but the lips are rounded (as in /u/, /o/, etc.). Also the dh /ð/ is pronounced as the th /θ/, but voiced instead of voiceless, so your vocal chords will vibrate while saying it like in the English words there, then, thou, heathen, among others. Hope this helps!
We need a part 3!!!!!! Is there already one that i can't seem to find??? i was a bit confused at the beginning of this video. the parts about where to put the stress and emphasis on the 2 syllable words :(
Thank you so much! I really enjoyed your video and learned a lot while getting some good notes out of it. I am also looking very much forward to the next one :)
I hope you make more of these videos. They're very good, from what I can see, seeing as I am just learning it, I'm no expert. But I must prefer to learn languages from seeing people speak them, with the texting, and not many videos I have seen have both those. Feel free to tell me if you make more. ^^
Ü is a kommon sound in Germany. I am german. It is actually tough for young children to decide weather something is written wit i or ü cause occasionally it sounds a little similar
3:45 - Y comes from Greek and the German ü is pronounced like it. In fact, in Spanish, the letter is called "Greek i." Pronounce Sindarin Y like EE with your lips rounded.
very nice video, just like last time. I don't remember you mentioning you've read and/or own a copy of the Silmarillion? there are some notes on pronunciation in there that i personally found very useful. Looking forward to the next one, assuming there will be more (will there? :D)
the letter "y" it's taken from greek. that grapheme was used to represent a phoneme sort of like the fench "u" or the german "ü", so that's why it was used by Prf. Tolkien. a easy way to pronounce it it's shaping the mouth as it you were to pronounce an "u" but instead making an "i" sound, and placing it on the paladar just behind the teeth
the thing with Y in german is that you can use it in 3 different ways. You can use it like the german umlaut Ü in some words, then like the german I (wich is pronounced exactly like the elvish I. actually ALL the vowels in elvish except the diphtongs are pronounced the same in german) AND you can use it like the german J (which is used differently in german than in english. It's actually used like similarly to the Y at the start of words like "Yes")
Even in ancient english y was able to have the same sound. The reason of the writing system is that y is a greek letter, which had that sound in ancient greek. The modern pronounce "I" both in Latin, Italian and English is a semplification
Anuran, Mae g'ovannen, melon nín! I like your explanation of dth. It is a good way to put it. It is what the th in than sounds like as opposed to think. I have studied Scottish Gaelic and German also and knowing those two languages' alphabets and pronunciation helps with things like "Ch"
Tolkien used the Finnish pronunciation of Y (Similar to French 'u') because as a linguist he was fascinated by Finnish language and used it as inspiration for his Elvish. Probably where rolling the R comes as well! (I'm Finnish myself)
In German, the letters Ü and Y sound the same in most of the words. The letter Y is also the phonetical symbol for the letter Ü (or the French U). Hence the confusion. The reason Elvish Ü can be pronounced /i/ is because /y/ (phonetical transcription of Ü) shares common phonetical features with /i/ (for instance, some French teachers tell their students to pronounce an EE-sound while shaping their mouth as though pronouncing an O, in order to get the pronunciation of U right).
I think you’ve already heard it but the Y becomes an ü because the Greek letter gamma is also the Y and was used to create the ü sound in old Greek. That is how the Y becomes an ü. And in Dutch you can pronounce the Y two ways: like a y in yo-yo and an ‘I’ as in ‘irritating’ , so that’s maybe why Elves say the Y like an u and an I? (Also, in Dutch we pronounce the u like an ü and an ü like an u-u (when the vowels “bump”). But that’s a whole other story. ) I don’t think this makes it any easier but only more confusing but whatever I liked to share.
the greek letter y was originally pronounced as a rounded / i / in classical greek. in IPA, the symbol / y / refers to this sound. French u, German and Mandarin ü are written as / y / in IPA.
One thing you cleared up for me and you made it so easy and plain to understand. "I eneth nin Anarun". Your explanation of how Im, similare to I'm can be used for a quick way to say it. Cool, Thanks for explaining that. I wish there was someway to make one's memoy better. I study and then before I know I have forgotten tihings. Dammit man! LOL!
I have studied Old Norse, and the "y" sound in Old Norse is pronounced the same as the "y" in Sindarin or the "ü" in German. It is pronounced as a "u-e" sound. Like a "u" pronounced at the front of the mouth.
On the subject of Y=ü, ü is a combination of the vowels i+u. In the International Phonetic Alphabetic, the symbol [i] stands for the long "ee" sound in English, so you would make that sound with your tongue while making an [u] with your lips. The result is a mix vowel between [i] and [u] which is probably why they said that making the [i] sound is an acceptable replacement.
Regarding the y- Tolkien took a lot of inspiration from Welsh for this language, and the Welsh “y” is very dark (although not really ü at all). If “y” is pronounced like the German ü, and also akin to the “i” in Sindarin, that isn’t too weird if you remember that ü is essentially that same bright “eee” sound with the lips wrapped around. It is like the Sindarin “i” but darkened by the lips.
K SO the thing with Y, Ü, and ii is that you can see it a LOT in Swiss German, at least that particular relationship of letters. 1. To properly say Ü, you make an EE (or ii, depending on how you want to look at it) sound within your mouth, and then shape your lips into an OO (or U). 2. That leads to the second point of the fact that in German, at least Swiss German, Y can also be an ii or EE sound. 3. SOOO in Swiss German you get words that go from "Grüssi!" (Grüss dich = Greet thee (ish), it`s SOME form of salutations) to "Griissi!" which could even be written "Gryyssi!" And if you´re saying the Ü correctly, it`s almost the same sound.
on the german y / ü: to a german ear, "ü" sounds much more like an "ee" than "u" (in butcher). In fact you could replace it with "ee", while if you replace the "ü" with butcher-u just for resemblance of the letters, you will confuse a german ear. In many european languages "y" stands for a somewhat darker, more rounded "ee"-sound. It could have worked as a letter for the sound of "ü" in german. I think it's more for morphological reasons (shift from u to ü like in Buch - Bücher, could be written with more concern to the sound well as Bycher)
The Sindarin "y" is sound is what linguists call a close front rounded vowel, that is, it's pronounced in the same way as a Sindarin "i", but with the lips rounded. The best way I've heard this described is that your lips are saying "u" and your tongue is saying "i" at the same time. The German "ü" is pronounced in the same way, but the Romanization is different. Whereas Tolkien opted for the more Finnish spelling, using the "y" (which, incidentally, is also the IPA character representing that sound), Germans use "ü" because the sound has a somewhat complicated history there. It was originally a digraph, "ue", because it marked a phonological process in German (and many other German languages) called umlaut (hence the different name for the diaresis), wherein a vowel underwent a mutation depending on its environment. The German umlaut fronted back vowels, meaning that vowels like "u" and "o", when paired with a front vowel like "i" or "e", had their position in the mouth moved to the front, but the rounding was kept. So the tongue moved to the "i/e" position, but the lips stayed rounded, hence the modern sound. The diaresis on top of the "u" is just an old scribe notation that ended up being used for efficiency's sake. Compare this to Finnish, which uses "y". Ancient Classical Greek had this same sound, represented by their upsilon, which came into the Latin alphabet as "y", hence why Finnish and other languages with this sound use "y" instead of "ü". TL;DR: German "ü" and Sindarin "y" are the same sound, just spelled differently. Tolkien probably used "y" over "ü" because English speakers will naturally pronounce it as "i" and therefore still be half-correct, and because English typewriters didn't have a "ü" on it.
Greetings, Andrew! I realy noticed a mispronounce of "a", "e", and so "ae" in the last video :D. But, as you said, it was expected coming from people who were more used to the Elvish tongues. I had not thought the vowels pronunciation strange because in my natural language (Portuguese) it is the same. And a curious fact is that in "The Silmarillion" it is said that the pronounce of "ae" can be the same as the German "eu" (as well as in "toy" or "boy"), but it can also be said as "ae" (the way you spoke in the video). I liked a lot the video! You could make more! Thank you :D
it did help a bit, thx. I all-ready know a few sentences. I'm not sure how to spell it. i know menmgongurring which means an elvish blade, and nor na ni ner nuir which means close the gaits. and nin dice which means your late.
The Sindarin vowel sound for is like the German *ü* (IPA /ʏ/~/y/: when saying ihh/eeee while the lips position for uuuu/oooo) as in the song title *Für Elise*.
in reference to you comment about Y to the german U (OO) sound, and if not possible to a long E sound, this is acomplished because the german U (cant find the symbol for it) is a long ee sound but with the lips closed down around the mouth to make it an Uh sound.
Great video, Andrew! Y´know, some Sindarin aspects are easier to me, for i am a native brazilian speaker, and some sounds are just natural in my language. Anyway, awesome tips, i would greatly apreciate more Sindarin, or even Quenya videos
A Hilgeman No, but I know the international phonetic alphabet and the pronunciation that Sindarin's phonology page on Wikipedia describes is [ð], which is pronounced like th in "this". The pronunciation that the man in the video describes would look like [dð] in the IPA, and I have no idea how he came to the conclusion that it'd sound like that.
You are correct. In the back of the silmarillion there is a page on pronunciations and it states exactly what you said DH is pronounced like the TH in then.
Maybe it would be helpful to focus, not on ideas like 'hard' or 'soft', but on what your larynx is doing as you say these sounds. If it is vibrating, the sound is ∂ as in 'these' . . . voiced. (Or 'sonant', if your textbook is a bit older.) If the larynx in NOT vibrating, the sound is unvoiced (or 'surd'), as in 'thorn'. [Which is also, I think, the name of the Rune for this sound.]
Thank you. Yes, that was weird the minute he said it. Some study into phonemics would certainly help! The pair this/thin (DH/TH) is the most obvious one, and I've generally relied on it. DH/TH voiced/voiceless pairs aren't common in English, but they do have some verb/noun combos that differ like this, and for some bizarre reason indicate the voiced (DH, verb) version by adding an E: breathe/breath, sheathe/sheath, bathe/bath, loathe/loath The problem is that the vowel also changes. sheathe/sheath and loathe/loath don't change, but breedh/breth, baydh/bath.
Just wanted to add a tip. In words like goheno nin (forgive me), the H sound is to be thrown into the back of your throat. Kind of like you'd hear a lot in the German language.
When I read the Hobbit and the Lotr Trilogy as a kid I pronounced all the place names typically Swedish. Later when I see all these videos of how they're supposed to be pronounced it is very similar to the way I have always pronounced them in my head. Not exaclty but much closer than how English and American people usually pronounce it in their languages.
I guess that's also where the switchimg for the y comes from. in welsh y can be an ee sound (for example as y forforwyn) or a urgh sound (like the word yn) there really are a lot of similarities between the pronunciations of welsh and sindarin
I´m coming from Austria so first of all I want to excuse my bad English. In some words in german the letter Y is pronounced ü but there is no always valid rule for that. For example the word"Xylophon" is pronounced "xülofon" (it´s a xylophone) but the word " Embryo" (it´s an unborn baby) is pronounced "Embrio" I hope i helped you a little bit! :) By the way, really cool video!
In ancient greek upsilon (written as a u or a capital Y) was pronounced as a german dotted u, the y in a lot of our words in english in fact derives from the greek u (or upsilon) like syringe or Egypt, or mostly wherever the y is in the middle of the word. Furthermore when teaching ancient greek in classical schools often you are encouraged to use an ee sound like in tree when the proper german u sound is too difficult
Please contribute to Sindarin for Duolingo! It is a great way to spread the language.
IT'S ON DUOLINGO OH BOI IVE NOT KNOWN ALL THIS TIME
@@curtislevey7639 what? Did they just add it???
@@tomrogue13 unfortunately not! They have Klingon and high Valerian, but not Elvish 😞
Why hasn’t this happened yet!!
@@curtislevey7639 no it isn't
Actually, is the same as in English for words as "this". It's just the voiced version of the found in words like "math".
And the use of is actually logic with German. Like in school "gymnasium". In German is often pronounced /y/. Oh yeah, I wrote /y/ because that's the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) letter for that sound. Which is reason 2 of why it makes sense. In IPA, "gymansium" would look something like /ɡʏmˈnaːzi̯ʊm/ (actually it's not exactly a /y/ but it's close enough… the /y/ sound is also found in French though).
I am so happy now that my first language is german.
lol mine too
JoschiChr me too
Ich auch lol
Kenn ich bei dem y...
Im Dutch but I speak German as well so same
The letter Y was borrowed from the Greek, Υ (minuscule υ). If I'm not mistaken, in modern Greek it's pronounced /i/ ('ee'), but in ancient Greek it was pronounced /y/ (German 'ü', French 'u' like in 'lune'). The letter y is still pronounced /y/ in German, Danish and some other languages. If you need help pronouncing it, try pronouncing 'i' while making an o-shape with your mouth.
Also, about the th/dh, my understanding of pronunciation guides differs somewhat. 'th' is equivalent to /θ/, which is the sound of the 'th' in 'through', 'bath', 'ethanol', etc. 'dh' is pronounced /ð/, sort of like a soft 'th'. It does exist in English, and is equivalent to the 'th' in 'the', 'bathe', 'father', etc.
I've gotten a lot of comments on this subject on this video, but this is probably the most inclusive and easiest (for me, anyway) to understand. Thank you!
Faez R-C The entire Elvish language composed by Tolkien was based heavily on Greek and Latin, especially Greek. The resemblance is undeniable. The phonetics match Greek strikingly.
@@Supermario0727 I thought Elvish languages were inspired by Finnish and Welsh?
Speaking Welsh, I could totally pronounce and speak Sindarin with ease
In the film, I can hear their English accents. It's similar as to when English people have learnt Welsh
True
Rwilliams it sounds like there's some galic in the language
Isn't the y pronounced like an ü similar to Welsh?
Caelan actually Quenya is based on Finnish
I`m moving to fairy-land pretty soon, so this is very useful! Thanks, man. Keep up the good work :)
+Eljulitus Thanks, let me know how your trip goes!
san francisco?
Tolkien was particularly well-versed in Old Germanic languages, especially Old English. In OE the letter encodes exactly the sound as the German letter . Moreover, the letter is derived from the Greek alphabet where it equally stands for this sound, it is called /ypsilon/ there. Last but not least it is also the symbol of the aforesaid sound in the IPA.
I didn't quite understand what you mean by changing to , but phonetically there is not much of a difference between the two sounds. An /y/ is the same as an /i/ with the only difference that the lips aren't spread but rounded.
I speak Bulgarian and we use Cyrillic instead of Latin letters and the 'y' in Sindarin is pronounced exactly like in my language. We always roll the 'R's and put emphasis on different parts of the words which is why pronunciation is one of the easiest parts for me when learning Sindarin.
Thank you so much for the video, the pronunciation definitely makes a difference and makes it sound more Elvish. :)
Yaass being Finnish is so great in these moments because it makes it so easy for me, for example the letter "I" is said exactly like "ee" so in Finnish its I not "ai" (thats how I would write how americans say I).. Wow this is so easy, I just read it.... Like I am reading my own language~~
+The5streetThe Lucky!
+The5streetThe Yup
being romanian makes the job much easier, because we use in our language all the vowels that Tolkien used.
a few years ago I looked at learning Finnish, it helped with my Elvish pronunciation a lot, Finnish is now my favourite real world language because of its similarities to Elvish, it just makes it all the more beautiful to me :)
Tolkien got inspiration from a few languages when creating elvish, and Finnish was major contributor, I imagine it was exactly in the pronunciation departement
I have studied German, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic, etc so all this pronunciation is easy to me too. Thank you for making these videos brother because you are cool and easily understood and you make it fun and easy. Again, Le hannon mellon!
Aiya! Awesome! When i was studying quenya I found your first video and now I am addicted about them all. Please, keep going with this videos, they are very interesting and incredibles. Greetings from Brazil! Tenn enomentielva.
OMG please make more videos,you've actually inspired me to learn Sindarin.I practice everyday now and really wanna get better. I've tried to read myself the courses but i don't know how to pronounce the words;Thats where you come in.Your videos are very educational and i would love to see more
I don't know if that helps you, but I speak german, and in german, the letters Y, E;Ü and I (as in machine) are very close relatives in their pronounciation. Actually, if you say the alphabet in german and come to Y, you will call it "üpsilon", which is close to the greek root word "epsilon". You have to understand that in german, the letters E and I stand very close to each other - they are distinguished by a certain form of mouth-modulation. On top of that, the letter Ü ist a mix of U and E in German, as if you spoke "ue" in one quick flow, and this is actually how you type it if your keyboard doesn't support umlauts. Umlauts are "mixed letters". So you can replace ü with ue if you need to, and you will get a better feeling for the equal emphasis on both letters in the combination.. Native english speakers often tend to give a little more emphasis to the u and less to the e (including you -.no offense, it's very common), since they see a U with dots. This is why you have the feeling that Ü is farther away from the e and its very close relative - y - , and closer to the letter u. However, they meet right in the middle, and once you know that, the vowel modulation will be closer to the I that you find in machine.
karaokefreak1 That's really interesting! Thanks for the comment!
Andrew Eder
Welcome. I like your videos and their calm style - very educational im my opinion. Great voice, too. You don't happen to sing, do you? Coming full circle to elvish: Because of the Umlaute rule, a lot of germans who try to say "mae govannen" will pronounce it "mä govannen". --> Ae = ä , oe = ö, ue = ü. <
And about the y - : think of the word "syndicate" or "symbol". The Y in these words is veeery similar to the typical ü -umlaut in german.
Ach hallo ich bin auch deutsch bin zurzeit aber in Australien 😂
PLEASE do another. I have been looking for some thing like this for ever now, and this is the first good one I have come across. :)
As an Estonian, we pronounce all those letters just the same way as in sindarin so it comes really easy. i also speak a bit finnish and russian so learning a new language comes quite naturally to me. But i really love your videos. Im just a tad under 2years late with my comment. Keep it going anyways. best of luck!
Wow this video is from 2015. It's 2018 and I discovered it just now. It's an amazing video. The easiest to understand for me. I enjoyed it a lot. Thank you for this.
for Slovak people, like me, it's much easier, because we usually just read as we see. You in English usually don't read as you see so it's much harder for you to learn Elvish :)
Love the video!
That's great dude! Thanks a lot. I'm from Brazil and it's so much easy for us ️to pronunciate when our main lenguage is Portuguese. Please keep doing this videos! Len hannon mellon nin.
The Sindarin Y gets its spelling from Old English and IPA. This sound, /y/ is actually very very close to /i/. It's identical except for the lips, which are pursed. That's why I tell people to make an /i/ in their mouth and a /u/ with their lips.
The Gondorians can't pronounce this vowel, so they say their /y/s like /i/s, dropping the rounding (pursed lips) from the vowel. This actually happened in English - all front vowels became un-rounded. This is why the Old English word "kyn" is "kin" today. It also means that people are mispronouncing Éowyn's name. ;)
I really appriciate your videos about Sindarin, because i really like the Elves. Now i can really get into this world again!
now i don't know Sindarin but in IPA and languages like Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish the symbol/letter *y* is pronounced like the *ü* in German, so maybe this is where the Latin transliteration of this sound in Sindarin came from
replacing *y* with *i* is probably because these 2 sounds are pronounced at the same position in your oral cavity (they are both high front vowels and put together at the same position on an IPA chart) and what differentiates them is lip rounding, so they are not thaat different
from the bit i just read on Wikipedia, *dh* probably sounds like the *th* in *the* in English while *th* is just like the *th* in *thin*, which is cool because in English you don't have this distinction in writing, both sounds are spelled with a *th*. so why *dh*? i guess that's because *th* is still used the same way for the same sound [θ] and *d* is the voiced counterpart of *t* so it makes sense to make *dh* [ð] the voiced counterpart of *th* (voicing also differentiates sounds like k-g, p-b and more noticeably s-z)
Tolkien was greatly inspired by Finnish and other languages Quenye High-Elf language has Finnish grammar and words the most.(there is lot of Germanic words in there too so not just Finnish) Sindarin is closer to Weilsh. I noticed Orc say "attack" in Hobbit movie and it was the same word in Swedish there.
Also LotR has few things very close to Finnish Kalevala book which Tolkien Read in Finnish (and learned Finnish to read it in the original lamguage)
wow really? i have heard Finnish was a great inspiration for Quenya and Welsh Sindarin but i thought they were priori languages, i wouldn't expect there to be words borrowed from any natural (or not) languages. so do you know what the Swedish dub for the line "attack" is? it's still the same isn't it?
I suppose so I can't remember and there are actually lot of words borrowed from other languages. Few can have the same meaning and some same word but different meaning. Like here:
www.sci.fi/~alboin/finn_que.htm#grammar
There are some info for you. Don't read everything if you go lower you can find same meaning words written differently and words that are the same but mean different things
Ada-Erika , excuse me, but, in this link you sent, an association is made wrongly: they associate Finnish's "-tär", that is said to be a feminine ending, with the Quenya "-tar", that means "high/lord". The context is the comparation between the Kalevala's character Ilmatar with the Silmarillion character Ilúvatar. Take it just as an observation: (I do not know what means "Ilmatar", but) Ilúvatar is made of two Quenya roots --> "ilúve", that means "everything, all", and "atar" (and not "-tar"), that means "father". So, Ilúvatar could not have conection with Ilmatar, once it's meaning is "The All Father".
One good way to understand the U with an umlaut (or the Sindarin Y) is to say "EEEEEEEEE" with your lips shaped like you're trying to say "OOOOOOOOOO" (like oo in shoot). This is the pronunciation for the unlauted U in German and is probably why the notes you reference say what they did about pronouncing the Sindarin Y. Interestingly, in German the Y has a very similar sound. Words like "typisch" sound very much like, "tooooopisch."
Thanks for the videos!
I love your voice and your subject knowledge. I can feel the passion you have for these topics despite the "nerdiness" as you put it. :P
Seriously though, great videos man. If you are doing this for fun, then know you just made someone's day. Keep it up!
Fan of the 501st I see.. Thanks for the amazing nerdy content. We have to stick together you know. Keep it up, you're getting places!
Please make a part three your tutorials are the best out there i need your help!
The "dth" sound that he's talking about does exist in English, it's actually a very common sound in words like the, they, them, there, those etc. The difference between the "th" in "thin" and the "th" in "their" is the voicing, if you pronounce "their" you'll feel a bit more vibration in your throat like how we distinguish the difference between f & v and s & z. It's actually a bit odd how English decided to represent the two sounds with one diagraph.
Plus there's the word breadth!
So the vowels are a lot like Spanish and Japanese pronunciations, thanks this is great. Didn't know the stuff about the syllables, I'm so excited to learn
Hooray! Thanks man! This is great, hope you can make more in the future
kinda old n late to the party but you deff do a better job explaining than other videos I've found. usually its hard to hear the person because they are speaking A) to soft B) have some annoying music in the background or C) go to fast. so nice job and thank you
Thank you so much for making these videos! They help a lot! Are you thinking of making more?
+animalzamzam Thanks! Glad I could help! Always thinking about, but usually too busy to act on it. :( Working on it though!
I love your videos! Thank you so much for this! :) Please keep making more!
this was very useful! I have been learning Sindarin and had trouble understanding but this really helped! I loved your fists video it also helped. My friend and I are now learning Elvish together and its all thanks to you! Guren *glassui!
As a spanish speaker, the rolling Rs, the DH sound and the vowels and many more features are like spanish so it really sounds very similar and quite alike to me. Its actually easier to pronounce Sindarin than english for us.
Same as portuguese
These videos are awesome. I'm glad that you made them! It's very fun and interesting to learn this!
The emphasis for Elvish words that are three or more syllables varies. If the last two syllables are connected by one or no consonants, the 3rd to last syllable gets the emphasis. If it is two or more consonants, then the 2nd to last gets the emphasis.
However, one must keep in mind that in Sindarin and Quenya, the combos "th", "dh" and "nd" are expressed with one letter. So although is-IL-dur is how you would pronounce that name, EL-en-dil and VAL-an-dil follow the one consonant rule since "nd" is one letter in Quenya. The combo "mb" is one letter in Quenya, but not in Sindarin. So cel-eb-RIM-bor is probably the correct pronunciation of that name since it is Sindarin.
Aaaahh, the elvish word for Orcs (Yrch) make a lot more sense now.
I'm so happy of being Spanish in this case hahaha lots of the pronunciations are the same. Thank you very much for these videos
I subscribed, commented and added it as a favorite! Took a screenshot on all the rules abd downloaded the video! I LOVE THIS
In some occasions the letter Y is actually pronounced Ü in German. For example Xylophon is pronounced Xülophon. I think in some Scandinavian languages, which are the languages Elvish is based on, it is also pronounced like ü.
Isnt Y and Ü said exactly the same way? I mean I am Finnish and Estonian and they both say them exactly the same. Its like it wouldnt matter if I wrote the estonian word "külaline" like "kylaline".. Because, its the same lol
+The5streetThe Yes, in some languages it's always pronounced ü. In German it is sometimes pronounced as ü, sometimes as i and in very rare occasions like the English y when it's the first letter of a word, as in "year".
The Swedish y is similar to the German ü.
The origin of this pronunciation is greek ! (In French we call it “greek i”)
This letter : “υ” became “y” with the time and the modifications it brings but it stayed pronounced ü in german like it was in greek. I guess it’s the same for northern language? I’m not sure for this part ^^
Look at an IPA chart and click on the y. On wikipedia it should lead you directly to an audio file with an pronunciation example. [y] is the IPA way of writing a sound that equals the German ü (this sound exists in other languages, too. IPA is universal for all human languages)
e.g. [ybə] (pronunciation) = (way of writing in German language)
Thanks for making these videos! They are really helpful. Please keep making them!
I'm fluent in English and Spanish and when I was starting to pronounce the words it felt almost exactly like Spanish with some extra rules.
Well done, mate! Makes it accessible to the common American wanting to learn Sindarin.
It may help understand the phonetics and phonology of any other language (elvish in this case), by firstly take a look to your own phonetics! I had the chance to learn a bit of English phonetics at college (but there are also many apps that you can look for), which helped me get many of the things you very well explained! Thank you, really! I love languages in general and I also love getting nerdish with lotr's stuff hahaha
Oh, a little Q, does Galadriel take an accent of sth of the sort? Cause in the movie it's "Lady gaLAdriel", the stress of the word is in the second syllable, right?
Hey Andrew. Interestingly, I found when doing my research that whenever we see DH in Elvish, it is a soft TH sound like in Leather, rather than a stronger TH sound like in though.Cheers mate, keep up with these vids. I even credited you in my essay haha
About the "Y" being pronunced like"ü", it coyld be related somehow with Greek. Because if, in Greek, you put "O" and "Y" together , you have "OY". And in Greek this combination of letters sounds like "u".
OMG! we used to have cyrillic alphabet and the letter Y as Ü sound in soviet times. our country and language is of turkic origin and we used the letter Y to pronounce “ü” sound as in German. that’s just mind boggling. of course after the collapse of the union we switched back to latin alphabet ( yes we used latin before bolshevik invasion). but you saying you don’t understand Y as Ü and I do understand is just weird and phenomenal 👍🏻
great videos even 5 years later
I know this video is quite old by now but: /y/ is pronounced as /i/ but with rounded lips. So the tongue is held high and forward (like in /i/) but the lips are rounded (as in /u/, /o/, etc.). Also the dh /ð/ is pronounced as the th /θ/, but voiced instead of voiceless, so your vocal chords will vibrate while saying it like in the English words there, then, thou, heathen, among others. Hope this helps!
We need a part 3!!!!!! Is there already one that i can't seem to find??? i was a bit confused at the beginning of this video. the parts about where to put the stress and emphasis on the 2 syllable words :(
Thank you so much! I really enjoyed your video and learned a lot while getting some good notes out of it. I am also looking very much forward to the next one :)
I hope you make more of these videos. They're very good, from what I can see, seeing as I am just learning it, I'm no expert. But I must prefer to learn languages from seeing people speak them, with the texting, and not many videos I have seen have both those.
Feel free to tell me if you make more. ^^
Please make more videos! This is so useful, thank you!
Ü is a kommon sound in Germany. I am german. It is actually tough for young children to decide weather something is written wit i or ü cause occasionally it sounds a little similar
3:45 - Y comes from Greek and the German ü is pronounced like it. In fact, in Spanish, the letter is called "Greek i." Pronounce Sindarin Y like EE with your lips rounded.
very nice video, just like last time. I don't remember you mentioning you've read and/or own a copy of the Silmarillion? there are some notes on pronunciation in there that i personally found very useful.
Looking forward to the next one, assuming there will be more (will there? :D)
HEY Andrew, I really enjoy your "speaking Sindarin" video's if you can make more, with more phrases n such that would be super cool. thanks bud!
mae govanent, mellon nin! I'm subscribing because I'm trying to learn Sindarin too! hope to see more of videos about Sindarin! Savo 'lass a lalaith!
the letter "y" it's taken from greek. that grapheme was used to represent a phoneme sort of like the fench "u" or the german "ü", so that's why it was used by Prf. Tolkien. a easy way to pronounce it it's shaping the mouth as it you were to pronounce an "u" but instead making an "i" sound, and placing it on the paladar just behind the teeth
YAY IVE BEEN WAITING FOR PART 2 THANKS
I have decided to learn elvish and I find your videos very helpful ;-)
Shame I'm finding this guy so late on.. also shame he didn't continue this series! I want more!
the thing with Y in german is that you can use it in 3 different ways. You can use it like the german umlaut Ü in some words, then like the german I (wich is pronounced exactly like the elvish I. actually ALL the vowels in elvish except the diphtongs are pronounced the same in german) AND you can use it like the german J (which is used differently in german than in english. It's actually used like similarly to the Y at the start of words like "Yes")
Even in ancient english y was able to have the same sound. The reason of the writing system is that y is a greek letter, which had that sound in ancient greek. The modern pronounce "I" both in Latin, Italian and English is a semplification
Anuran, Mae g'ovannen, melon nín! I like your explanation of dth. It is a good way to put it. It is what the th in than sounds like as opposed to think. I have studied Scottish Gaelic and German also and knowing those two languages' alphabets and pronunciation helps with things like "Ch"
Tolkien used the Finnish pronunciation of Y (Similar to French 'u') because as a linguist he was fascinated by Finnish language and used it as inspiration for his Elvish. Probably where rolling the R comes as well! (I'm Finnish myself)
In German, the letters Ü and Y sound the same in most of the words. The letter Y is also the phonetical symbol for the letter Ü (or the French U). Hence the confusion. The reason Elvish Ü can be pronounced /i/ is because /y/ (phonetical transcription of Ü) shares common phonetical features with /i/ (for instance, some French teachers tell their students to pronounce an EE-sound while shaping their mouth as though pronouncing an O, in order to get the pronunciation of U right).
I think you’ve already heard it but the Y becomes an ü because the Greek letter gamma is also the Y and was used to create the ü sound in old Greek. That is how the Y becomes an ü. And in Dutch you can pronounce the Y two ways: like a y in yo-yo and an ‘I’ as in ‘irritating’ , so that’s maybe why Elves say the Y like an u and an I? (Also, in Dutch we pronounce the u like an ü and an ü like an u-u (when the vowels “bump”). But that’s a whole other story. ) I don’t think this makes it any easier but only more confusing but whatever I liked to share.
the greek letter y was originally pronounced as a rounded / i / in classical greek. in IPA, the symbol / y / refers to this sound. French u, German and Mandarin ü are written as / y / in IPA.
One thing you cleared up for me and you made it so easy and plain to understand. "I eneth nin Anarun". Your explanation of how Im, similare to I'm can be used for a quick way to say it. Cool, Thanks for explaining that. I wish there was someway to make one's memoy better. I study and then before I know I have forgotten tihings. Dammit man! LOL!
cool stuff dude! I've always found this stuff interesting xD
This, I like this a lot! I would watch more. If you make more videos on Sindarian I'd watch them 10/10
Nice to see that you keep going with the elvish tutorial videos. Do you produce more in the future?
I have studied Old Norse, and the "y" sound in Old Norse is pronounced the same as the "y" in Sindarin or the "ü" in German. It is pronounced as a "u-e" sound. Like a "u" pronounced at the front of the mouth.
On the subject of Y=ü, ü is a combination of the vowels i+u. In the International Phonetic Alphabetic, the symbol [i] stands for the long "ee" sound in English, so you would make that sound with your tongue while making an [u] with your lips. The result is a mix vowel between [i] and [u] which is probably why they said that making the [i] sound is an acceptable replacement.
I can't explain how excited I was for this second part. You made my day ^^
Regarding the y- Tolkien took a lot of inspiration from Welsh for this language, and the Welsh “y” is very dark (although not really ü at all).
If “y” is pronounced like the German ü, and also akin to the “i” in Sindarin, that isn’t too weird if you remember that ü is essentially that same bright “eee” sound with the lips wrapped around. It is like the Sindarin “i” but darkened by the lips.
K SO the thing with Y, Ü, and ii is that you can see it a LOT in Swiss German, at least that particular relationship of letters.
1. To properly say Ü, you make an EE (or ii, depending on how you want to look at it) sound within your mouth, and then shape your lips into an OO (or U).
2. That leads to the second point of the fact that in German, at least Swiss German, Y can also be an ii or EE sound.
3. SOOO in Swiss German you get words that go from "Grüssi!" (Grüss dich = Greet thee (ish), it`s SOME form of salutations) to "Griissi!" which could even be written "Gryyssi!" And if you´re saying the Ü correctly, it`s almost the same sound.
on the german y / ü: to a german ear, "ü" sounds much more like an "ee" than "u" (in butcher). In fact you could replace it with "ee", while if you replace the "ü" with butcher-u just for resemblance of the letters, you will confuse a german ear. In many european languages "y" stands for a somewhat darker, more rounded "ee"-sound. It could have worked as a letter for the sound of "ü" in german. I think it's more for morphological reasons (shift from u to ü like in Buch - Bücher, could be written with more concern to the sound well as Bycher)
Indeed u speak a very fluent Elvish(: I hv jus started to learn Elvish few days ago...Hope to learn a bit more, please make more videos my lord
Thank you for your guide it Really helps keep up the Good work, love from Sweden
That is great! Thanks for doing the video! It was really helpful ^^
The Sindarin "y" is sound is what linguists call a close front rounded vowel, that is, it's pronounced in the same way as a Sindarin "i", but with the lips rounded. The best way I've heard this described is that your lips are saying "u" and your tongue is saying "i" at the same time. The German "ü" is pronounced in the same way, but the Romanization is different. Whereas Tolkien opted for the more Finnish spelling, using the "y" (which, incidentally, is also the IPA character representing that sound), Germans use "ü" because the sound has a somewhat complicated history there. It was originally a digraph, "ue", because it marked a phonological process in German (and many other German languages) called umlaut (hence the different name for the diaresis), wherein a vowel underwent a mutation depending on its environment. The German umlaut fronted back vowels, meaning that vowels like "u" and "o", when paired with a front vowel like "i" or "e", had their position in the mouth moved to the front, but the rounding was kept. So the tongue moved to the "i/e" position, but the lips stayed rounded, hence the modern sound. The diaresis on top of the "u" is just an old scribe notation that ended up being used for efficiency's sake. Compare this to Finnish, which uses "y". Ancient Classical Greek had this same sound, represented by their upsilon, which came into the Latin alphabet as "y", hence why Finnish and other languages with this sound use "y" instead of "ü".
TL;DR: German "ü" and Sindarin "y" are the same sound, just spelled differently. Tolkien probably used "y" over "ü" because English speakers will naturally pronounce it as "i" and therefore still be half-correct, and because English typewriters didn't have a "ü" on it.
Greetings, Andrew! I realy noticed a mispronounce of "a", "e", and so "ae" in the last video :D. But, as you said, it was expected coming from people who were more used to the Elvish tongues. I had not thought the vowels pronunciation strange because in my natural language (Portuguese) it is the same. And a curious fact is that in "The Silmarillion" it is said that the pronounce of "ae" can be the same as the German "eu" (as well as in "toy" or "boy"), but it can also be said as "ae" (the way you spoke in the video). I liked a lot the video! You could make more! Thank you :D
it did help a bit, thx. I all-ready know a few sentences. I'm not sure how to spell it. i know menmgongurring which means an elvish blade, and nor na ni ner nuir which means close the gaits. and nin dice which means your late.
The Sindarin vowel sound for is like the German *ü* (IPA /ʏ/~/y/: when saying ihh/eeee while the lips position for uuuu/oooo) as in the song title *Für Elise*.
The Y sound as i understand it is pronounced like in polish Y so use some kind of transator or forvo to get it
in reference to you comment about Y to the german U (OO) sound, and if not possible to a long E sound, this is acomplished because the german U (cant find the symbol for it) is a long ee sound but with the lips closed down around the mouth to make it an Uh sound.
That "oo" merges with "ee" by keeping your tongue up in front in the "ee" position while you round your lips as if about to say "oo"
Great video, Andrew! Y´know, some Sindarin aspects are easier to me, for i am a native brazilian speaker, and some sounds are just natural in my language. Anyway, awesome tips, i would greatly apreciate more Sindarin, or even Quenya videos
Do a part 3 please
The DH explanation was very wrong. Th is pronounced like the th in "think", while dh is pronounced like the th in "this".
Officialhelpkenet so you speak sindarin?
A Hilgeman
No, but I know the international phonetic alphabet and the pronunciation that Sindarin's phonology page on Wikipedia describes is [ð], which is pronounced like th in "this". The pronunciation that the man in the video describes would look like [dð] in the IPA, and I have no idea how he came to the conclusion that it'd sound like that.
You are correct. In the back of the silmarillion there is a page on pronunciations and it states exactly what you said DH is pronounced like the TH in then.
Maybe it would be helpful to focus, not on ideas like 'hard' or 'soft', but on what your larynx is doing as you say these sounds. If it is vibrating, the sound is ∂ as in 'these' . . . voiced. (Or 'sonant', if your textbook is a bit older.) If the larynx in NOT vibrating, the sound is unvoiced (or 'surd'), as in 'thorn'. [Which is also, I think, the name of the Rune for this sound.]
Thank you. Yes, that was weird the minute he said it. Some study into phonemics would certainly help! The pair this/thin (DH/TH) is the most obvious one, and I've generally relied on it.
DH/TH voiced/voiceless pairs aren't common in English, but they do have some verb/noun combos that differ like this, and for some bizarre reason indicate the voiced (DH, verb) version by adding an E:
breathe/breath, sheathe/sheath, bathe/bath, loathe/loath
The problem is that the vowel also changes. sheathe/sheath and loathe/loath don't change, but breedh/breth, baydh/bath.
Just wanted to add a tip. In words like goheno nin (forgive me), the H sound is to be thrown into the back of your throat. Kind of like you'd hear a lot in the German language.
Your videos are epic, like totally brutal, keep up with your good work :)
When I read the Hobbit and the Lotr Trilogy as a kid I pronounced all the place names typically Swedish. Later when I see all these videos of how they're supposed to be pronounced it is very similar to the way I have always pronounced them in my head. Not exaclty but much closer than how English and American people usually pronounce it in their languages.
I really would like to learn how to speak some Tolkien language fluently. Very interesting to me and I love his work.
I guess that's also where the switchimg for the y comes from. in welsh y can be an ee sound (for example as y forforwyn) or a urgh sound (like the word yn)
there really are a lot of similarities between the pronunciations of welsh and sindarin
I´m coming from Austria so first of all I want to excuse my bad English. In some words in german the letter Y is pronounced ü but there is no always valid rule for that. For example the word"Xylophon" is pronounced "xülofon" (it´s a xylophone) but the word " Embryo" (it´s an unborn baby) is pronounced "Embrio"
I hope i helped you a little bit! :)
By the way, really cool video!
Super helpful video thank you so much! I love the way you explain the vowel sounds in particular. Awesome awesome awesome.
and as I speak german and czech it's quite easy for me to pronounce the letters in the elvish ways as it is very similar to these 2 languages I know
In ancient greek upsilon (written as a u or a capital Y) was pronounced as a german dotted u, the y in a lot of our words in english in fact derives from the greek u (or upsilon) like syringe or Egypt, or mostly wherever the y is in the middle of the word. Furthermore when teaching ancient greek in classical schools often you are encouraged to use an ee sound like in tree when the proper german u sound is too difficult