# any names in Tolkien's work starting with J or X? Did he exclude J due to his first initial? Who knows? Or Jesus?



## smoofzilla (Jan 11, 2020)

curious about the absence of names starting with J - prove me wrong please I'm trying to find one - as well as X... I can't seem to find them.


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## Elthir (Jan 11, 2020)

"Jolly" Cotton 

Galin "Ando"


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## smoofzilla (Jan 11, 2020)

well that's reassuring. Now for an X


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## Elthir (Jan 11, 2020)

Jolly was seemingly a nickname by the way, but still a name.



> Now for an X



For an X . . . see the runes in Appendix E 

Ando


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## smoofzilla (Jan 12, 2020)

Yes I am sure it may be a rune but specifically the start of a name? I wonder if he intentionally omitted these letters as the initials of important first names. Jolly is certainly up there with strange names like Olorin or Peregrin...!


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## Elthir (Jan 12, 2020)

Yes, I was only joking about the X shaped rune.

Ando


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## smoofzilla (Jan 12, 2020)




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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Jan 14, 2020)

Jolly's real name was "Wilcome" -- at least in "translation", and the nickname had the same meaning as Meriadoc's -- in fact, Tolkien used the same word, "jolly", in describing the meaning of the short form, "Merry" (Westron _Kali, _"an abbreviation of the now unmeaning Buckland name Kalimac").

The only point being that it's a common sort of nickname, differing from Elvish Olorin, or Frankish- or Gothic-derived Hobbit names like Peregrin, in that it's in line with the low mimetic world of the Shire. In fact, all the Cottons mentioned in the Scouring chapter are referred to by their nicknames.

Does anyone know if Tolkien indicated definitely that Sam's family were Harfoots? If so, the Cottons were likely to be too.

The author clearly had fun playing with these names, "an all too fatal attraction"; Sam's cousin Hal allowed him to introduce a slightly naughty play on words, for instance, which apparently almost no one caught.


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## smoofzilla (Jan 14, 2020)

Well apparently you have caught it, but I have not (regarding Hal?) 
But what do you think of my postulation, that an importantly named individual initialed J was intentionally ommited to avoid any correlation to religious figures or his own first name? It seems rather odd that its the only letter in the alphabet other than X to not have a "fancy", although I would think X is less of a concern.
Unless "J" was "X"ed..!


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## Elthir (Jan 14, 2020)

There's also Jago and Jesamine (see Boffin Of The Vale, Appendix C).

Galin Unbanned


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## smoofzilla (Jan 14, 2020)

That is commendable although they had no main role in the tale, it is still worthy of note. Thank you!
For me the oddity remains that in the main narrative a name ending in these letters are absent. But, you have certainly made me feel better about the absence of the letter J so far. Actually, my sister's friend had stolen my old John Howe LOTR books, and never returned The Hobbit either. I left my LOTR in China coincidentally, that hotel maid or her family may be highly amused: those giant skypscrapers where reminiscent of the Twin Tower with its blinking red lights, but the people are very nice in China. I kind of freaked out and rushed outta China leaving the books there (on purpose)! Not to mention three boxes of South Africa Red Bush Tea not found elsewhere in the world


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Jan 14, 2020)

I was hoping one of our language experts would jump in here, but they seem to be having a slap-fest on another thread, so I'll venture to say that, if I understand correctly, the J-sound appeared only in Westron, which is "translated" as English. Therefore it's unsurprising to find a few Shire names starting with J, but not elsewhere (I assume you are still talking about starting, not "ending" as you wrote above.

In any event, I seriously doubt it was to avoid "John" or "Jesus"; Tolkien would certainly be aware the latter name was a translation of _Yeshua,_ etymologically the same as Joshua. And typologically also, but that's another matter.

On Hal, his name comes up in the Menippean conversation in The Green Dragon, cited by Sam as the eyewitness for 'these tree-men, these giants, as you might call them'.

Ted Sandyman is skeptical: 'Your Hal's always saying that he's seen things; and maybe he sees things that ain't there.' And so on.

At one point, Sam retorts that 'you can't deny that others besides our Halfast have seen queer folk crossing the Shire'. There are two little jokes here: one being that "Halfast" is, IIRC, an Old English word meaning "steady and reliable" -- which the preceeding conversation has gone some way to undermining.

The one I alluded to earlier is the other: we'd normally pronounce it as "Hal-fast", but it's also possible to divide the word differently, with the first syllable pronounced as English "half".


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## Elthir (Jan 14, 2020)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> I was hoping one of our language experts would jump in here, but they seem to be having a slap-fest on another thread, so I'll venture to say that, if I understand correctly, the J-sound appeared only in Westron, which is "translated" as English. Therefore it's unsurprising to find a few Shire names starting with J, but not elsewhere (I assume you are still talking about starting, not "ending" as you wrote above.




Hmm. Do we know the sound as in "jolly" [ʤ] appeared in Westron? Or in Hobbitish Westron? Generally speaking (and not that you said otherwise in any case), I would say that Tolkien's translation-thingy need not relate to sounds.

If Tolkien had chosen to call Merry "Jolly" in the book instead of Merry, his real (short) name would/could still be Kali, for example. That said, even if that makes sense, I'm no expert in Westron phonology . . . so I'll shut up now.

🐾


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Jan 14, 2020)

A note in the Appendices says "_j _represents the sound of English _j_". If he had later thoughts about this, I don't have access to them at the moment.


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## Miguel (Jan 14, 2020)

Helcaraxë. I don't recall other words at the moment.


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## Elthir (Jan 14, 2020)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> A note in the Appendices says "_j _represents the sound of English _j_". If he had later thoughts about this, I don't have access to them at the moment.




Ahh . . . excellent note of a note S-ES! I obviously don't write enough (any) Westron in Tengwar! And if JRRT had any later thoughts about this and didn't publish them . . . then it don't matter to me. And after getting off my lazy *%#, I also found (according to J. Allen), that the Westron name for the tengwa "Anga" is _*Jé.*_

Galin


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Jan 14, 2020)

Hmm. So the Westron name for Angband might be, um, "Jail"?


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## Elthir (Jan 14, 2020)

Jeepers! It just might be!

Jalin Unjailed


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## Miguel (Jan 14, 2020)

Jalin Un-naked 😍


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## Elthir (Jan 14, 2020)

Surely you jest 

By the way, S-eS, I didn't mean to imply you had merely assumed j existed in Westron due to Tolkien's translation conceit. In case you inferred this.
I edited my above post in any case.

And in case Ando reads it at some point!


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Jan 14, 2020)

Say whut? 🤪

No -- on second thought, don't say!


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## Miguel (Jan 14, 2020)

Galin said:


> Surely you jest



Hey, an image is worth a thousand words. If you let me see, i'll let you behold 😉


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## Olorgando (Jan 15, 2020)

I'm wondering if it has to do with the fact that west European languages can't agree on how J is to be pronounced. The letter J seems to be a post-Roman addition to the alphabet, to pronounce a sound the Romans didn't have in their alphabet (I don't know about the Greek alphabet and its derivatives, just too unfamiliar with that). A case in point more generally are the Slavic languages that use the Roman alphabet instead of the Cyrillic script, like Polish or Czech. They need all sorts of squiggles on their Cs and Ses to denote sound not found in Germanic- or Roman-derived languages; Turkish, too - which Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey's founder, declared was to be written in Roman script instead of the Arabic used before. Apparently Arabic was even worse in portraying sounds found in the Turkish language that did not exist in Arabic.
For J, there's the leader of the Argonauts from Greek saga (or mythology), Jason. In German, his name is spelled Iason, as it also appears to be in Greek and Roman. English pronunciation of the J seems to be derived from French, though not an exact copy. Or, there's the term jungle, IIRC derived from one of the languages of the Indian subcontinent. Well, to write this in German (derived from the probably-already-corrupted English term) we need to render it "Dschungel". I know all about this J discontinuity, I spent nine years explaining to Americans that my real-world first name, while being spelled with a J, is to be pronounced as if it were Y … 🙄
For X, names in any language starting with that letter seem to be rare. Off the cuff, there's the Persian king Xerxes, but that was Greeks transcribing from another language, something they were not really good at (their term for non-Greek speakers was "barbarian"; talk of snobby!), or Xanthippe, Socrates's wife (whose name has become proverbial for a nagging woman, perhaps specifically wife, in German), and Xaver in German, or perhaps more correctly in Bavarian (and that band leader Xavier Cugat) - oh, and that star of the Spanish national football team of years gone by, Xabi Alonso.


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## Elhath (Jan 16, 2020)

The "characteristically modern Indo-Europeanish" initial sound "j" = dʒ which is found in Italian, Modern English etc. is natively absent in most of Tolkien's favorite languages such as Finnish, Greek, Latin and older literary Welsh — which probably explains why his "within-the-world" created names show the same rarity. The sound WAS, however, apparently found in the _middle_ and at the _end_ of certain words in some variants of Old West Germanic, such as in (the reconstructed scholarly pronunciation) of Old English a.k.a. Anglo-Saxon.


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## Olorgando (Jan 16, 2020)

Elhath said:


> The "characteristically modern Indo-Europeanish" initial sound "j" = dʒ which is found in Italian, Modern English etc. is natively absent in most of Tolkien's favorite languages such as Finnish, Greek, Latin and older literary Welsh — which probably explains why his "within-the-world" created names show the same rarity. The sound WAS, however, apparently found in the _middle_ and at the _end_ of certain words in some variants of Old West Germanic, such as in (the reconstructed scholarly pronunciation) of Old English a.k.a. Anglo-Saxon.


As a native speaker of New High German (as well as New High(?) English), I have not been able, off the cuff, to think of usage of the J in the middle of modern German words. For J used at the end of words, I only have a vague suspicion that this may be limited to the westernmost edge of what can nowadays be considered the Germanic language distribution, aka Dutch / Flemish (originally Germanic "Anglo-Saxon" having been seriously polluted by Norman French after 1066). And as for "Anglo-Saxon" (not the modern Saxon dialects), that is something of a borderline case, more North Germanic - southern Norse, one could say, taking Norse as the ancestor of Norwegian, Icelandic, Swedish and Danish, blending into northern "Low" German - "Niederdeutsch". "Hochdeutsch" or "High" German apparently starting at about the middle, latitude-wise, of modern Germany, the terms strangely, if I have understood this correctly, having much to do with altitude - "Low" German being spoken in the north German lowlands, "High" German in the Middle Mountains starting in about the geographic middle of Germany and continuing into the Alps. Which would make the dialect, almost a separate language bordering on Dutch, "Schwyzerdütsch", or Swiss (non-high) German, a variant of the Alemannic German also understood in parts of south-western Germany, the "Highest" German. Which would make all of my linguistic instincts rebel massively … 😵


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## Starbrow (Jan 16, 2020)

One example of /j/ in the middle of words is in names. My maiden name is Tietjen (pronounced Tee-jen) and my ancestors are from northern Germany - Hamburg area, I think. There are still families with the Tietjen name in Germany. BTW, my parents grew up speaking the Plattdeutsch, or Low German, dialect.


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## Olorgando (Jan 17, 2020)

Starbrow said:


> One example of /j/ in the middle of words is in names. My maiden name is Tietjen (pronounced Tee-jen) and my ancestors are from northern Germany - Hamburg area, I think. There are still families with the Tietjen name in Germany. BTW, my parents grew up speaking the Plattdeutsch, or Low German, dialect.


Oh yes, and on TV even: Bettina Tietjen (but pronounced Teet-yen), co-host of a monthly talk show from 1997 until it was integrated into another format in 2019, losing its name, which for the longest time had her name in the title - though it was her first name for a couple of years. She continues as co-host of the other format. Appropriately, the shows are produced by the north German affiliate of the federally organized public TV channel 1, the "Norddeutscher Rundfunk" or NDR.

A note of possible interest to philologists is a dialect sound-shift found (at least) in the Berlin dialect: there, the G often mutates to a J (spoken like the Y in German).

There used to be a show on the NDR channel 3 that was "op Platt", or in Plattdeutsch dialect. Can't say I can really follow such conversations. But then, if the dialects get too thick in Bavarian, Franconian, Saxonian, Swabian, Hessian, Rhineland dialect etc. I have the same problems. Another point of possible interest are the Frisian dialects spoken on the Frisian Islands off the North Sea coast. The North Frisian and East Frisian Island belong to Germany, the West Frisian Island to the Netherlands. Supposedly, *all* Frisians can understand each other, while Germans and Dutch listening in who don't know the dialect are left in incomprehending confusion.


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