Introduction

Syllabus

Part I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part II

Chapter One

Back to Realelvish

If you are taking my Sindarin course and are not a linguist, you will find this short guide to basic usage of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA, for short) useful. Otherwise, skip this.

I use it in my lessons because:

• It is internationally recognized as a way to describe pronunciation.
• It is the most accurate way to depict how words are pronounced outside of looking at the sound waves themselves.

Before switching to this system, I tried using the system found in American dictionaries but found it inadequate because there are sounds in Sindarin that don't exist in English, and the international students had no clue what I was using. Before that, I tried to use typical English letter combinations, but this was even worse. There are many different English accents, and as clear as I tried to be, there are multitudes of ways to pronounce any set of letters in English. This is why I ask you to use IPA instead of the dictionary system or English spelling. I tried, and it just didn't work.

Now that you know why I expect you to use it, let's learn how to use it.

IPA's letters are listed by two charts: one for vowels, the other for consonants. Consonants are listed by where in the mouth they are found, and how they made.

Take, for example, the "t" of "tack", the "p" of "pack" and the "c" of "cake". Those sounds are made the same way, and they are in the same row, the Voiceless Stops.

Now take this example: the "p" of "pet", the "b" of "bet", the "f" of "fret", the "v" of "vet", and the "m" of "met". All of these sounds are labial, that is, made with the lips. They are in the same column.

So, here is a chart of all of the American English consonants, overlaid with the Sindarin ones. Sounds only found in English are in red; sounds only found in Sindarin are in blue, and sounds found in both are in purple.

The two biggest categories of how sounds are made are the voiced and unvoiced sounds. Voicing is the vibrating in your throat that you feel when you speak. If you whisper, your throat won't vibrate at all. You'll be speaking "voicelessly".

And now for vowels. Vowels are categorized in four ways. In their chart, the columns list if they are "rounded" or not (rounded refers to the puckering of the lips, like in the "u" of "Luke") and where in the mouth they are articulated. The rows list how far open the jaw must be to make the sound, and the way that the inside of the mouth is shaped (lax or tense, the difference between the "i" of "bit" and the "ea" of "beat".

Here is the chart of English vowels, overlaid with the Sindarin ones.

As you can see with the number of blue and red squares, using systems designed for describing English just won't work for Sindarin. A fun fact: English is one of the few languages to have more than five vowels.

So, now that we know what these symbols mean, how do we use them? It's actually quite similar to normal spelling. You simply list the sounds in the order that they occur. Let's try this on a few words.

However, these are not the only aspects of pronunciation that you need to learn to describe. There are also vowel length, stress, and syllables.

Vowel length isn't phonemic in English (meaning that we don't use it to differentiate between words), but it does exist. Say these two words carefully to yourself:

"beat" and "bead"

They are transcribed like this:

/bit/ and /bi:d/

The colon is used to show that the vowel is spoken for a longer period of time. There are other symbols for showing the length or shortness of a vowel, but they don't apply to English.

Here is our word list with vowel length markers included.

Another thing IPA covers is syllable division. Instead of dashes or bullets, it uses periods. Here is the wordlist with syllable divisions added.

The reason for worrying about syllables is to find where the stress is placed. Stress is how loudly a syllable is spoken. In English, we have to worry about two types of stress: primary and secondary. The marks telling where the stress falls go before the syllable when the syllables are marked. If the syllable divisions aren't marked, then it goes before the vowel of the syllable. The above one (ˈ) marks the primary (loudest) syllable, and the below one (ˌ) marks the secondary (second loudest) syllable. Once again, let's look at our revised wordlist.

And that's it. You now know about IPA. There are actually many more possible symbols than just the ones found in this lesson, hundreds more in fact. These are just the ones that you need to worry about. Anything that a language can use to differentiate between words can be described with IPA, from pauses to pitch. We only need this little sliver of it for English and Sindarin.