Since Tolkien compared Dwarves once with medieval Jews, perhaps a Yiddish accent might be of use?

Question: Are there different accents between the 7 different tribes?

... --merpadmin, Sat, 11 Nov 2006 13:02:08 -0800

Source? I could not find this in "Letters" anywhere. But there is this from his famous 1971 radio interview: "The dwarves of course are quite obviously - wouldn't you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic."

	- JRRT

... --merpadmin, Sat, 11 Nov 2006 13:02:39 -0800

Dwarvish Westron = Yiddish English. The Movie uses Glaswegian Scottish English.

... --merpadmin, Sat, 11 Nov 2006 13:02:50 -0800

Does it? Curious. I thought the only Dwarvish character in the Movie to speak much was Gimli, and the actor in question is Welsh (and sounds it).

First comment addition, --Os. --Osric, Mon, 13 Nov 2006 06:11:09 -0800

I would have thought the source was Letters; I certainly 'knew' JRRT had a 'Semitic stereotype' in mind and not (I think) from the radio interview. He says something similar of the sounds of Adunaic, and links that to the influences of Dwarvish on the vocabularies of the early Mannish language(s) -- this in PoME?, if not before.

PoME?'s 'Of Dwarves and Men' also explicitly states that dwarves were not great linguists and always retained a distinctly dwarvish accent. (Though elsewhere this was contradicted by a comment that dwarves were great linguists; I'd prefer them not to be.) And there's another bit in there where he says they refuse ever to learn Sindarin (or all Elvish?) because of the War of the Nauglamir.

(Movie-Gimli doesn't sound Welsh to me, nor terribly Glaswegian. But the repeated use of "Laddie" is very Scots.)

PoME? did say that the Khuzdul of the Seven Houses changed, but then goes on to say that this was so slight that all Dwarves could always use it as a lingua franca. The Houses might have recognisable accents of Khuzdul, but I'd be surprised if these were strong enough to colour the genericly Dwarvish accent that Khuzdul put into any other language they spoke.

Second comment addition, --Os. --Osric, Mon, 13 Nov 2006 06:14:19 -0800

The 'subject' slot as you write a comment is made bold. It would help if the corresponding subject line of each comment in the body of the article could be made bold too. [Experimenting: can we make things <b>bold</b> with simple html ourselves?]?