Evening

I've been listening to The Lord of the Rings on CD this past month and I'm nearing the end of the Fellowship. I'll have plenty of thoughts on the experience when I'm done (I guess in another two months, at the rate I'm pacing through it), but I just want to say one thing:

Spoken English, English English, is music to the ear.

Want an example?

Take the word evening.

The way I say, the way everyone I know says it, the way I've heard it all my life, is this way:

EEV-ning. Two syllables, accent on the first.

The way the British narrator of The Lord of the Rings CD says it, though, is magical. Listen:

ee-ven-ing. Three syllables, all subtly un-accented.

Say the word even. Now say it adding the suffix -ing. ee-ven-ing.

Almost as if it was a verb. I can image two medieval peasants working at a bench, fashioning some sort of spear or arrow. To be most effective, all the arrows or spears need to be the same length. So what the two of them do is even them all up. They are evening.

That's how my narrator speaks the much more common word for the noun gloaming.

And to me, it's sublime!