: : I'm in need of a pronunciation guide for many of the names, places, etc. Tolkien references. Yes, I know there are many many linguistic/phonetic type systems out there -- with rather arcane symbols and physiological-oral guides ("No, no, more of a lateral liquid, not a bilabial medio-dental fricative..."). I studied linguistics in college, and even *I* find these references unhelpful.

: Julian Bradford the moderator of the TolkLang list has placed recordings of spoken elvish (pronounced the way it should be) on the Web at: http://www2.dcs.ed.ac.uk/misc/local/TolkLang/pronguide.html

: Perhaps you could get the actors to listen to these first, to give them a feel for the pronunciation.

I checked it out too. I liked it. It's the kind of pronunciation guide (the kind with recorded examples), that mean more to most people than a mountain of pronunciation symbols or "sounds like" an aspirated labial in the sound of 'e' in the German 'bet', but spoken backward with the 'r' trilled. But even with the help, I don't think I'll be speaking Elvish anytime soon. I was a bit surprised at the pronunciation of Elendil, which I had always said as Elen-DILL. (el-EN-dahl). But I suspect that there will be some anglosizing of some of the names, just as we've done with Greek and Hebrew names. This topic of spelling and pronunciation has gotten very hot on Ain't It Cool News under the Lord of the Rings topic. Some are very upset that the official WEB site for the film mispelled Gandalf as Gandolf, and feel the producers don't care. Others are more willing to let "typos" go and could care less if the actors pronounce Elvish words correctly so long as the film is good otherwise. But as far as mispelled words go, most of us are aware that it took Tolkien (and later Christopher) years to get all the typos out of LOTR. JRRT would submit a list of corrections, only to have the printers add other errors in the process of revising the book.