NOME - Dwarvish voices

[SwallowedUpInVictory]

What does Dwarvish sound like for you? I want to elicit the sound of the Dwarvish tongue without influence from PJs interpretation.

"they could not conceal their voices. Phonetically they were acute and could pronounce learned languages well, but their voices were very deep in tone with laryngeal coloration, and they among themselves spoke in a laryngeal whisper."

Can someone (a linguist maybe) give an example of a typical layngeal language? I want to know what I can compare Dwarvish to and listen to some examples on youtube as I am missing knowledge. Or maybe there is a recording of JRR or Christopher talking in Dwarvish?
In my imagination Dwarvish sounds like Yiddish because Tolkien said once that in his mind Durin's folk reminds him of the Jewish people. Yiddish has strong correlations with German which is a language I know well and which sounds rough to many ears. Of course German is a language Tolkien had affection to and could speak quite well. I also find garden gnomes (Gartenzwerge = garden dwarves) have a rabbinic appearance with their long beards and white hair. (Don't get me wrong. I don't want to insult anyone. I honour love the Jewish people and culture.) This is a personal theory but probably wrong. I hope one of you can give me other inspirations.

Speaking of garden gnomes... I was listening to the early HoME series from Mythgard Academy in the last weeks and I wonder if garden gnomes were the reason why the characterization of Dwarves changed so much around the time of writing the Hobbit, from evil to ambiguous to good. Similar to the Elves' backstory, Tolkien may have incorporated changes into his legend to explain why we think of them so different now. With the Elves it was their dwindeling over time which caused that people only think of little Tinkerbell nowadays, while with the Dwarfes he had to modify their eagerness in order to have a continuum to today's whim of garden gnomes. People think of them as cute and funny and that does not fit at all to Mim from the Book of Lost Tales and Nordic traditions. John Garth says "Thanks to the later British fad for ornamental garden gnomes (not so named until 1938), gnome is now liable to raise a smirk, and Tolkien eventually abandoned it." Tolkien abandoned the name but he could not leave all the stage to Walt Disney. He therefore invented Dwarves more ambiguous to reconcile the past with the present.

 

[Haerangil]

The comparison of Tolkien's dwarves to jewish people is so overrated and misunderstood!

It was a relatively late developement, roughly around the time he was writing the Hobbit and before he had started even inventing Khuzdul as a language. Before his dwarves already had been existing but they were of questionable morality, possibly creatures of Melkor, warlike, greedy, traitorious.

Something happened to Tolkien and he revisited his dwarves, they already had been great craftsmen, miners and artists and even fighters before, but now he re-imagined them as a more noble, intellectual people who had lost their original home, who lived among other peoples and yet still remained largely among themselves and kept alive most their own language and culture, even being a more than a bit secretive. That was the point where Tolkiens quote on a similarity to the jewish people came in, where he saw parallels. It was not about being small, having long beards, long noses, yellowish skin, or being greedy ... none of these anti-jewish stereotypes, at last he does not pronounced make his comparison in any of these things.

He used semitic languages, especually hebrew, loosely as a basis for the two languages he created at this point, Adunaic and Khuzdul (later his untranslated Westron and possibly some of the pre-numenorean terms and placenames as well). He did that possibly because he always felt the general feeling of a language should fit to his literary creations, the characters and cultures they are made for.

That is it.Laryngeal means from the throat, the gullet,the voicebox. It is not very typical for any language that i am aware of, certainly not hebrew or arabic. Mongolian throat singing has become something of a meme recently though... thanks to Dune and the Sardaukar.