Nobody talks about the Shibboleth of Feanor enough.
That is, nobody talks about the Shibboleth of Feanor enough correctly.
Feanor did not decide to pronounce things weird, what he observed was that over the millennia, language gradually changed, and he Did Not Like That. Feanor decided that the language Shouldn’t Ever Change for various reasons, including being the fun police, and being emo about his dead mom, but explicitly, one reason that Feanor wanted everyone to try to speak as close as they could to the same way they did when the first elves awoke is so that there wouldn’t be a language barrier if they ever met the Sindar again.
Now, if we assume that most of the Exiles were around Feanor’s age or younger, and if we assume that Feanor froze his version of Quenya at the point that Miriel died, then we can further assume that everyone who spoke mainstream Quenya did so natively from childhood, learning to speak the language with several of the sound changes that Feanor objected to.
Meanwhile, the younger generations of Feanor’s faction will have grown up speaking the old-fashioned, Feanor approved version of Quenya.
We know, specifically, that one sound change that Feanor personally cared about was the s/th merger, because the th appeared in his mother’s name, Miriel s/therinde. Th is a weird sound, it’s hard to pronounce and is rare across world languages, so it makes sense that Quenya would do away with it. However, Sindarin kept the th. And while Feanor’s Quenya wasn’t the same as Sindarin, both because Feanor froze it at an arbitrary point, and because Sindarin changed probably as much as Quenya did, it stands to reason that it would be closer than the standard version.
Which is all to say, that given the ban and general politics in Beleriand, I find it deeply ironic and hilarious that the Feanorians are the ones who naturally find it easiest to learn Sindarin and have the best Sindarin accents.
Or, TLDR, the sons of Feanor are the only Noldorin leaders who can pronounce “Thingol” correctly, and everyone Hates That.
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