Lord of the Rings Humour: Parodies, Satires and More [4]

Eldorion wrote:

halfwise wrote:I think if you throw a little 'u' in with an 'a', Brits somehow manage to hear an 'r'.  Clueless.   Tolkien spelled it right at least; you wouldn't catch him throwing an 'r' in just to mess with a vowal sound.  He rightfully put a 'u' in there.  And you pronounce it, and it's NOT AN R.

My takeaway from this is that we should start writing the dragon's name as "Smag" to remove ambiguity.

Or we can turn the u upside down it and make it Smang.

I liked that.

azriel wrote:Uhuh
Praps the one way to shut people up about how you pronounce this or that is to have Tolkien himself say it. As of in an interview,

I've been searching. My recording of him only has Riddles in the Dark and a bunch of poems from Lord of the Rings. Can't find an interview where he's talking about the Hobbit, so no Smaug.

You say potato i say tom ar to.

If that's a definitive example of the Brit-style 'ar', then we Americans would spell it

"tomae-to, tomah-to". Not a whiff of r in there to our ears.

How would you spell "tomar-to" so that we could hear an r when you say it? Can we even make that happen I wonder?

tomarrr <<"(look too many rs to ignore!")- to ? ??

Then sometimes it sneaks in what linguists call 'overcompensation':" I sawr it yesterday, good enough film I'd be willing to see it again."

Not mine, but taken from another forum.

haul.

taut.

nautical.

fraud.

want me to go on?

it's 'Smorg' definitely*.

(*how i pronounced it in my head when i read the book when i was 9)

fyi: mount everest should be pronounced 'eve-rest', not 'ever-rest' - bu it sounds wrong so it is wrong, i don't care how right it is, it's wrong.

I'm afraid an American wouldn't understand your point.  I don't understand your point.  If you'd actually pronounce the 'r' (which you seem not to) you'd realize "Smorg" can't possibly be correct.  'taut' and 'haul' are pronounced slightly different, 'haul' fits 'Smaug' pretty nearly.

to us, you Brit types say 'heart' and 'hot' almost the same way. If there was a word 'hod' you'd be hard pressed to make it sound different from 'hard'. In fact taken out of context, we wouldn't hear the difference in both of those because you don't pronounce the 'r'.  We can hear slight differences as you pronounce them, but we put it down as a complete and utter failure to properly enunciate an 'r' that follows a vowel. To us it's a speech impediment we are gracious enough to forgive in foreigners. We'd read it SmoRRRRg.  But then again, you'd probably read 'RRRg' as 'ehg' so have no idea what I'm talking about.

"August" = "Argust" (NOT!)

To be clear, I've got nothing against you lot flippantly ignoring 'r' as written, but to insist it should be forcibly wedged into a word when you have no intention of pronouncing it in the first place....I call that vandalism.

We say va'r'se (vase, a receptacle for flowers ) & there isn't an R in that. We have hod carrier ( brick layer ) ? And there's Caught & Court, its all arse about face here Does it help if half our words are foreign to begin with ? Old English died out long ago & we have many interlopers

azriel wrote:   We say  va'r'se (vase, a receptacle for flowers ) & there isn't an R in that.  

No, you bloody well don't say 'varse'.  What you say is 'vahse'.  You may think you're saying varse but it's completely in your head.  Any Yankee can set you straight on that so long as they're not from Maine or Boston.  No doubt you lot think you're saying 'Borston' even when you are clearly saying Boston.

I love the way Americans say aluminum.

Aloominum i think they say.

All good fun thou. Being a northerner from Yorkshire i cant say my vocabs perfect.
Shire where the Hobbits live is ok, but when i say York-shire. I actually say Yorksher.

Well, at least when the Brit-influenced say 'aluminium' they throw in an extra vowel that they pronounce. For some god-forsaken reason we took that final 'i' out, and it took the music out of stressing the third syllable, so we put the music back in by stressing the second syllable instead.

Nothing wrong with 'Yorksher', but are you pronouncing either of the 'r's? I think you're probably saying 'Yohksheh'. I don't complain when you don't pronounce an 'r' that's there; it's when you stuff one in and insist you pronounce it but don't that gets me riled up.

'taut' and 'haul' are pronounced slightly different, 'haul' fits 'Smaug' pretty nearly.

You guys are all nuts. Forget about English and try this way:

Clear as mud

so those crazy extra vowels are just ways to say sounds we use just don't spell as unambiguously.

Our vowles make sense. *nods* Except for words where when o is å, and e is æ. But those are exceptions, obviously.

And for the rest of the sounds we have diphthongs.

Sadly - I must say 'sadly' as it basically ends the discussion - while I was looking for youtube videos of Norwegian diphthongs, I came upon a very obvious thing that made it all pointless: The 'au' in Smaug: ouch. Couch. So... there we have it.

I'm happy with it. very close to Eldo's (and half the time mine) pronounciation of Smowoog.

Really ? There goes the bubbling pot of indecision again

I don't remember seeing this?