TOLKIEN
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Languages |
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Languages Ever since the publication of his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has been named the ‘master of language creation’ by some. He infact began the creation of his languages long before he ever even imagined his created world. When Tolkien was in his early teens, he encountered an invented language, or rather code, created by his cousins Mary and Majorie Incledon. They called it Animalic, and was a language where English words swapped meanings, and Tolkien found it amusing, so he learnt it. Later, when Majorie lost interest in Animalic, her sister Mary and some friends began to make a replacement language. Tolkien was himself involved in the creation of this language, and it became known as Nevbosh, meaning New-Nonsense (with Animalic being the old nonsense). This language was mainly composed of distorted English, French and Latin words. However, when Nevbosh died, Tolkien embarked on the creation of his first private language, Naffarin. He never shared this language with any friends, although says that he wished to. Some words of Naffarin were remnants of Nevbosh, while most were original in origin. The sounds of this language were based on Latin and Spanish, and many words are reminiscent of those from more complex linguistic creations, which were yet to come. Tolkien was adamant that languages should sound beautiful and be pleasing to the ear, and this belief of his would later play an important role in the creation of his Elvish languages. He found the languages Spanish, Latin, Gothic, Greek and Italian pleasing, while French, a language often praised as extremely ‘beautiful’, pleased him little. Later, he discovered the languages Finnish and Welsh that would become the most influential pre-existing languages on his own. Infact, these languages pleased him so much that he based much of the phonetic structure of and style of Quenya and Sindarin (respectively) on them. There are even apparent ‘borrowings’ from Finnish into Quenya that can be seen today, such as the pronominal endings for verbs -n and -mmë (for ‘I’ and ‘we’) which appear to have been taken directly from Finnish, and the locative case ending, which in Quenya is -ssë, seems to be related to the Finnish inessive (of location) case ending -ssa/-ssä. Also, the consonant mutations of Sindarin are very much like those of Welsh. However, unlike Finnish and Welsh, Quenya and Sindarin were derived from a common primitive language, called Primitive Elvish, and because Tolkien did not simply make up words as he needed them, he created a set of linguistically tuned rules to derive each descendant language from the primitive root, giving it the desired final effect. We can see his technique by looking at the Elvish numerals from one to ten:
But where did these words come from? Did Tolkien just pluck them out of thin air, and think “oh yes, that’ll do!”? That was often not the case. He felt that words should seem like they were meant to mean what he assigned them to mean; he wanted them to have the feeling of that meaning. Occasionally, he would have achieved this simply by his own judgement and personal opinion, but it has been widely agreed that many Elvish words fit their meaning well. Quenya examples include elen ‘star’, menel ‘sky’, vanya ‘beautiful’, lótë ‘flower’ and masta ‘bread’, however you may also disagree. In certain cases, there are infact apparent reasons why certain words seem to phonetically fit their meaning; usually because they have been borrowed from other languages! Such Quenya words include pé ‘mouth’ from Hebrew, lá ‘no, not’ from Arabic and cen- ‘see’ is similar to Chinese kan. Also varya- ‘protect’ is similar to Norwegian verje of the same meaning, pilin ‘arrow’ is reminiscent of Scandanavian pil and mat- ‘eat’ seems to have something to do with the Nowegian and Swedish word mat meaning ‘food’. Also, with the knowledge that the primary inspiration for Quenya was Finnish, could it be that their word for ‘Elves’, Quendi has any relation to the old Scandinavian name for the Finns, kvener? Considering that Tolkien created the entire world that we see in his masterpieces such as the Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, the Unfinished tales, and many more for the soul purpose (other than his own satisfaction) of creating a place where people could greet each other with the immortal words elen síla lúmenn’ omentielvo, it seems only fitting that we honour him best we can after his life’s work is set before us. For some, a way to do this would to immerse oneself in Tolkien’s linguistic creations, in order to get inside the heads of the immortal Elves, fair and wise, first-born of Eru Ilúvatar and teachers of mankind during its youth. Other reasons to want to do this are wishing to study the lifework of a talented linguist, just as one might study a well known artist’s work, or musicians compositions, or more even basically to widen one’s linguistic knowledge and terminology. I personally probably would not have known what terms like assimilation, ablative, lention, instrumental and aortist meant if I had not required them to study Elvish. But whatever your reason for wanting to embark on this linguistic roller coaster, I hope you enjoy the ride! At the moment, the only Tolkienian language of which there is any material on this site is Quenya. I do (eventually) plan on writing some on Sindarin, but my knowledge of the language is still limited at the moment. QUENYA GRAMMAR – a concise survey of the grammar of High-elven QUENYA LEXICON – an English to Quenya wordlist of approximately 2,000 words TENGWAR
FOR QUENYA – the mode of writing used by Quenya QUENYA
COMPOSITIONS & TRANSLATIONS – original compositions in High-elven,
as well as translations into Quenya |
