I will put on my geek hat for a moment here. Palantír is a Quenya word. The 'accent' mark does not denote stress; it denotes the length of the vowel. Helge Fauskanger, one of the leading Quenya scholars, says in his Quenya Course chapter on pronounciation:
The spelling palantír has mislead many, making them think that this word is to be accented on "tír". Here is something Ian McKellen, playing Gandalf in the Peter Jackson LotR movie trilogy, wrote as the film was being shot:
...I have to learn a new pronunciation. All this time we have being saying "palanTÍR" instead of the Old English stress on the first syllable. Just as the word was about to be committed to the soundtrack, a correction came from Andrew Jack, the Dialect Coach; he taught me a Norfolk accent for Restoration, and for LOTR he supervises accents, languages and all things vocal. Palantír, being strictly of elvish origin should follow Tolkien's rule that the syllable before a double consonant should be stressed – "paLANTír" making a sound which is close to "lantern"...
Andrew Jack was right. Palantír cannot be stressed on the final syllable; virtually no polysyllabic Quenya words are accented in such a way [lengthy explanation] So it is indeed "palANTír". (But in the plural form palantíri, where the long í suddenly appears in the second-to-last syllable, it does receive the accent: "palanTÍRi".)
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Date: 2003-12-21 09:26 pm (UTC)The spelling palantír has mislead many, making them think that this word is to be accented on "tír". Here is something Ian McKellen, playing Gandalf in the Peter Jackson LotR movie trilogy, wrote as the film was being shot:
...I have to learn a new pronunciation. All this time we have being
saying "palanTÍR" instead of the Old English stress on the first syllable.
Just as the word was about to be committed to the soundtrack, a correction came from Andrew Jack, the Dialect Coach; he taught me a Norfolk accent for Restoration, and for LOTR he supervises accents, languages and all things vocal. Palantír, being strictly of elvish origin should follow Tolkien's rule that the syllable before a double consonant should be stressed – "paLANTír" making a sound which is close to "lantern"...
Andrew Jack was right. Palantír cannot be stressed on the final syllable; virtually no polysyllabic Quenya words are accented in such a way [lengthy explanation] So it is indeed "palANTír". (But in the plural form palantíri, where the long í suddenly appears in the second-to-last syllable, it does receive the accent: "palanTÍRi".)