“Since Tolkien was a highly educated linguist I’ll side with him over Disney.”
Reasonable. I seem to remember, however, reading Tolkien back in the day that he changed the grammar/spelling deliberately, I think it was to give it a fantasy flavour, differentiate Middle Earth from reality, or something. It was a long time ago and I could be mistaken.
He did seem like a fan of The Who, though. After all, didn’t his tree creatures communicate via Ent whistles?
I don’t remember anything about Ents having whistles.