Posted: October 24, 1999 at 14:57:03: by Smaug the Scholarly
: Taking a break from the Christianity debate which is going nowhere fast and on to something a little more literal...: I read a post by MM on the Anglo-Saxon issue and found that Tolkien was not only a scholar of Enghlish (Old, middle, modern) but also of a whole host of other languages. : This brings Elvish and Dwarvish tongues to mind. From what languages did Tolkien derive these from or were they partially derived and partially made-up? It's important to remember that the Guvnor was first and foremost a philologist, someone who studies the origins of words, grammar, language. As such Tolkien had to be familiar with a wide variety of ancient european languages including Old English, Middle English, Old High/Low German, Middle German, Gothic, Icelandic, Danish, Finnish, Lombardic, Gothic etc. Some of these, such as Gothic have had to be "re-invented", almost entirely from scratch, inferring what a word might have been from how the word changed over time or translation into different languages, due to the fact that very few of their words have survived the centuries intact. This was the root of Tolkien's obsession with "made-up" languages. Tolkien's preferences were for Finnish and Welsh from which he derived much of the grammar and word structure of Quenya and Sindarin, though Sindarin bears more resemblence to Welsh than Quenya to Finnish, for example Welsh amar (wound), amarch (dishonour), amorth (misfortune,curse) recall Sindarin amarth (doom/fate), or, du (black) with Sindarin duath (shadows) etc (apologies for lack of accents but couldn't really be bothered). The language of the Dwarves, Khuzdul, poses more problems as to its derivation. This is mainly due to the fact that a) so few examples of it exist (only 20 or so words and 2 or 3 phrases) and b) Tolkien himself wrote very little about it. It bears some resemblence to our semitic languages e.g hebrew in terms of the arrangement of consonants and vowels. Generally though Tolkien chooses to mix and match. The Northmen of east Rhovanion are given Gothic names, the Rohirrim speak Old English and have names though in the same tongue, dwarf names are of Old Norse formation and the personal names of some upper class hobbit families are early medieval names of Germanic origin. Jim Allen's "An Introduction to Elvish" is a good source for further information on this topic, alternatively there is a very good Tolkien language resource on the web called Ardalambion, to which I attach a link (if it works!)
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Ardalambion
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