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lkb57
Registered User
Jul 15 2022, 8:49pm
Post #1 of 14
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The sound of Dwarvish Voices
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Hi all, first post and hopefully the Reading Room is the appropriate place.
I was reading The Nature of Middle-Earth Part III, Chapter XIX (pg. 371), which contains a short essay on Dwarvish voices. In addition to confirming that dwarves have deep voices, Tolkien states that the dwarves spoke with "laryngeal coloration" and when speaking among themselves, they spoke in "laryngeal whispers".
Is there a linguistic/phonetic expert out there who might be able to describe to me what "laryngeal coloration" and "laryngeal whisper" sound like?
Cheers!
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Aelfwine
Rivendell
Jul 15 2022, 9:36pm
Post #2 of 14
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Basically, it means whispered speech, where the sound of speech is provided by the larynx, not as in normal speech by the vocal cords.
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Carl F. Hostetter
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Hamfast Gamgee
Tol Eressea
Jul 16 2022, 8:39am
Post #3 of 14
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Dwarves where generally quiet and secretative characters.
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uncle Iorlas
Rohan
Jul 18 2022, 12:29pm
Post #4 of 14
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notwithstanding that I am not the right man to challenge this
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Basically, it means whispered speech, where the sound of speech is provided by the larynx, not as in normal speech by the vocal cords. This has been nagging at me. "Whispered speech" seems like an awfully simple idea for a philologist on Tolkien's level to be describing with such technical terms.
I only ever made it through one introductory course in linguistics as an undergrad, and looking around a bit, I'm beginning to suspect that the term "laryngeal coloration" is largely immune to a quick and dirty web search; the results for this and "laryngeal whisper" are few and often simply instances of this very remark by Tolkien, but the other material relates to linguistic theory sufficiently abstruse that I can barely read it. An example or two:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory
https://brill.com/view/journals/ieul/2/1/article-p24_2.xml?language=en
https://wrdingham.co.uk/cybalist/msg/157/93.html
It does seem, more or less, from what I can gather in these sorts of articles if I squint at them hard enough, that "laryngeal coloration" refers to vowels being altered by some category of incompletely-understood fricatives going on in the rear areas of the mouth, velars and uvulars if not literally laryngeals, and that the relevant experts have their own disagreements about how any of these have been pronounced and how they've passed from language to language—mostly with reference to extinct and even hypothetical languages, particularly Proto-Indo-European and Hittite.
I think this is consistent with Tolkien's general positioning of the dwarves' language as dauntingly foreign and difficult to the other populations around.
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Voronwë_the_Faithful
Valinor
Jul 18 2022, 7:24pm
Post #5 of 14
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You probably are aware of this
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But just in case you are not, Aelfwine is justly considered to be the world's leading expert on Tolkien's languages, and he is the editor of The Nature of Middle-earth, the book that contains the essay in question. Not that what he says is sacrosanct and above challenge (no one is, from J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien on down), but what he says on this subject is as close to definitive as there could be.
'But very bright were the stars upon the margin of the world, when at times the clouds about the West were drawn aside.'
The Hall of Fire
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uncle Iorlas
Rohan
Jul 18 2022, 9:15pm
Post #6 of 14
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I'd managed to cotton on to the book, though I've not had a chance to read it, I didn't know he was a linguist. And I'm certainly prepared to be proven wrong, it happens all the time, here as much as anywhere.
Fact remains, though, I'm seeing "laryngeal coloration" out there, being used to mean something considerably more fiddly than "whispery."
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Voronwë_the_Faithful
Valinor
Jul 18 2022, 10:43pm
Post #7 of 14
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Aelfwine and his colleagues in the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship have been editing and publishing Tolkien's linguistic papers, primarily in the journals Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar, for at least the past 30 years, working mostly from manuscripts provided by Christopher Tolkien and with his blessing, as well as working in the Bodleian and Marquette University Tolkien manuscript archives.
'But very bright were the stars upon the margin of the world, when at times the clouds about the West were drawn aside.'
The Hall of Fire
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ElanorTX
Tol Eressea
Jul 19 2022, 6:33am
Post #8 of 14
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And much indebted we are *bows deeply* //
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"I shall not wholly fail if anything can still grow fair in days to come."
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Eldy
Tol Eressea
Jul 19 2022, 6:08pm
Post #9 of 14
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Meaning no disrespect to Aelfwine...
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...I don't know that it's necessary to throw his credentials in someone's face just because they disagreed with him? I get that you said he's not above challenge, but I think the tone of your post somewhat undercuts that disclaimer. In any event, I look forward to reading anything further he might have to say on the topic of this thread.
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Voronwë_the_Faithful
Valinor
Jul 19 2022, 6:40pm
Post #10 of 14
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It was not my intention to "throw his credentials in someone's face" but rather to simply provide relevant information that I did not believe my friend Uncle Iorlas was aware of.
'But very bright were the stars upon the margin of the world, when at times the clouds about the West were drawn aside.'
The Hall of Fire
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uncle Iorlas
Rohan
Jul 19 2022, 8:31pm
Post #11 of 14
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It's relevant information, and kinda funny
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Ultimately, though, I'm not trying to tear down Mr. Hostetter or challenge his CV, so defending his credentials is a bit off to the side. I was just scrabbling about to try and find the most complete answer to the original poster's question.
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uncle Iorlas
Rohan
Jul 27 2022, 6:43pm
Post #12 of 14
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I had another go, looking ideally for someone giving audible examples of what a linguist might mean by "laryngeal coloration." Still not coming up with a whole lot, but here is an interesting discussion of the phenomenon with at least some theorized words actually spoken out loud, and more importantly, zero mentions of whispering, but rather concentrating on the way "backed" consonants—lost ones, in our real-world case—leave evidence of their presence by drawing neighboring vowels toward their positions.
I think what's being described in the original quote is a language heavy with scraping glottal sounds of the sort we English speakers might associate with kh and maybe gh, rather than a language in which everybody whispers.
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Aelfwine
Rivendell
Jul 30 2022, 12:24am
Post #13 of 14
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Tolkien is referring to two different but related phenomena. When he talks about a "laryngeal whisper", he means speech where the sound is not produced by the vocal cords, but instead by the obstruction of release of air in the larynx. This "laryngeal whisper" applies uniformly to all sounds produced in this manner.
Laryngeal coloration, meanwhile, applies to individual sounds, presumably when produced with the vocal cords. This is what gives Khuzdul its guttural character, as per App. E, and apparently likewise colors their pronunciation of non-Khuzdul speech (an "accent"). So "laryngeal coloration" isn't really anything new; but the "laryngeal whispering" has, I think, not been mentioned before.
--
Carl F. Hostetter
(This post was edited by Aelfwine on Jul 30 2022, 12:29am)
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uncle Iorlas
Rohan
Jul 31 2022, 12:21am
Post #14 of 14
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That makes sense. Little as I found for "laryngeal colouraton," I found nothing at all about "laryngeal whispers," Yours does of course seem a pretty reasonable interpretation of that, and adds a dimension to the imagined subterranean discourse of dwarves on their own.
(I just now realized that in my last post I behaved as if I'd provided a link but didn't actually do it! My apologies, it was this fellow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngnh76-mxsU)
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