Same problem here man.

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Sun is by sea-men always hoped for,
when they fare away over the fishes' bath,
until the brine-stallion they bring to land.
OERP

Out of curiosity, to all you Smorg sayers, where are you from? On an exchange program, I found that most people (that I met at least) don't pronounce 'r' in certain words. My example is Hawk and Fork. All the Brits, Kiwis, Ozzies and Scots were saying them almost as hook and fook (sorry, that sounds bad, I just don't know how to phonetically write what he was saying) and couldn't recognize the difference (not the first letter, obviously). I don't mean to offend anyone, just wondering.

As an aside, I was made fun of for saying hawk, in the mind of a Kiwi, like hack. Which I can assure you, I wasn't. Then about 2 hours later at a dinner, someone asked me to pass a fook. I had no idea what he was saying lol.

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"Leave Sauron to me."
If you're in the Raleigh, NC area, let me know.

I always pronounced it "Smog" and was taken aback by the trailers pronouncing it differently.

Strange to hear you say Australian's drop the r. As an Aussie smorg sayer, i would say we are heavy on the R and in fact add them into other words like "fark".

But yes native accents are fantastically different around the world. I find those cultural differences interesting and take no offence to them being discussed.

When I was in the UK in the 90s i was trying to book a B&B on the phone with a Scottish lady. Took me 5 goes to realise when she was asking "soonum" she was saying "surname". My surname is Murray and i hated saying my own name after my trip to Scotland, because to me my Aussie accent butchered the word after hearing it said so beautifuly by the Scots.

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I think a drug habbit would be cheaper...

Lol, maybe it's not dropped, he just pronounced it very differently. I tried getting the guy to say just 'are', but he kept saying 'ah'.

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"Leave Sauron to me."
If you're in the Raleigh, NC area, let me know.

I'm now wishing I could hear your accent Draugluin so we can compare!

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I think a drug habbit would be cheaper...

Seriously tho, who is "Smorg" even an option, there are no "r"s in his name?

I just have a standard American accent, even though I was raised out in a rural area that has a lot of country/southern accents. Watch Captain America, that's basically what I sound like.

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"Leave Sauron to me."
If you're in the Raleigh, NC area, let me know.

It helps to be german because for us au is ow.

my answer to that is just because.

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I think a drug habbit would be cheaper...

I say "Smaog" and "SAO-ron" in spite of the fact that when the books were read to me as a child, my stepfather said "Smog" and "SOAR-on".

I think the transition came when I bought the books for myself. I'm pretty sure the appendix of Return of The King set me right. "Thay-oh-den," not "Thee-oh-din." "Lay-go-lawss," not "useless elvish git"

I've noticed my fellow americans sometimes struggle to pronounce the diphthong in Smaug, but it doesn't give me any trouble. Unfamiliar words don't tend to make me stumble, I just read up on, and internalize, the phonetic rules of the relevant culture. Of course, I do run into a problem that people from my hometown constantly ask me where on Earth I'm from. Apparently I have a newscaster's accent, exceptionally sterile.

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Elrond Nine Sixteenths elven does not exactly roll off the tongue.