Re: Muta cum liquida in JRRT (was "Double stressed" words)

On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 11:59:34AM -0400, Isidora Zamora wrote:
> What, precisely, is muta cum liquida?  (I know it's Latin, and I know
> Latin, but by education extends only so far.)
In Latin, when you have a consonant cluster consisting of a stop
plus a "liquid" (l or r), that cluster counts as a single consonant
rather than a double consonant for purposes of syllabification.
This affects the stress of the word.

There's an open question whether or not this is the case in
Sindarin, which otherwise has the Latin stress rules.
If muta cum liquida applies, than the "dr" in "Imladris" is an onset
cluster, making it im-la-dris; the penultimate syllable is short
and thus the stress goes on the antepenultimate, and you get
IM-la-dris.  If muta cum liquida doesn't apply, than only the "r"
is the onset of the last syllable, while the "d" is the coda of
the previous one: im-lad-ris.  That makes the penultimate syllable
long and changes the stress to im-LAD-ris.

> And drat!  I just finished about a month ago reading _The Hobbit_, _LOTR_,
> *and* _The Silmarillion_ aloud to my 8yo daughter and 6.5yo son, and now I
> find out that I may have been misprounoucing some of the names.  I was
> trying to be *so* careful not to do that!
This is a minor point that doesn't affect the pronunciation of most
names.  Fear not. :)

-Mark