Quote Originally Posted by lastalliance View Post
Thank you, Berephon and Cleitanious. After looking at Tolkien's writings in the appendices, it seems that the circumflex "û" also demands stress, forming the only possible exception to the stress-falls-on-first-syllable-of-bisyllabic-words-rule. The examples given were Annûn and Amrûm. Is my interpretation of the writings correct? The examples should be stressed as an-NUN and am-RUN?

And is the Sindarin "y" really pronounced as an English short "u"? I had thought it was much closer to a German "ö".

Thanks again. My confusions are gradually fading.
If you see a diacritic, it usually demands stress as it indicates a long vowel (Númenórean, for instance, is NOO-meh-NOHR-ee-ahn.) However, ordinarily the stress falls on the first vowel (in two syllable words) or the next to last vowel in multi-syllable words. In some cases, it falls on the syllable third from the end, as in Gah-LAH-dree-ehl or AH-rah-gohrn.

Y in Sindarin is technically pronounced as the u in the French word lune (which has that weird truncated eu -- almost a short yu -- that no one but a Frenchman can pronounce.) However, as it hardly appears anywhere except at the end of multi-syllable plural words, it usually gets truncated to a short i (as in him), a sound that does not otherwise appear in Sindarin.