Just curious: who among you ever tried to learn, or learned Elvish of Tolkien? Quenya or Sindarin?
(LoTR was on the cable TV last night ;D)
I haven’t yet, although I do planning on taking a good look at it. I was given a nice book on the languages of Middle Earth and it is quite fascinating.
Apparently, he assigned English to the language of the storytellers, so the hobbits’ language, or the common tongue is represented by English. Then almost all of the other languages are ones that are analogous to English… i.e. the language of Rohan, from which a great deal of the common tongue is derived, is actually Old English, and the language from which a great deal of common is assimilated is one of those elvish languages which is analogous to Latin. Some of the other languages, which are intended to be related but not derived from are represented by Gothic are Scandinavian. Very interesting linguist that Tolkien.
I honestly can’t see myself spending time learning non-existant languages… It’s one thing to do “dead” languages because there is an abundance of real and valuable literature to be discovered in them… but to learn a whole language just for the sake of a few books… no thanks 
That is my view as well, but he was a very intelligent man and I think he must be worth a look for his efforts and linguistic prowess.
Not to mention that many people have learned them and speak them for kicks (similarly to other synthetic languages like Esperanto).
Yes, I saw many people investing horrible efforts in making tengwar fonts, developing typesetting system for TeX, composing poems, doing calligraphy, and making contact with people across continents to order a wedding ring with elvish inscriptions. But my basic attitude is like that of klewlis. I just turned around to restart greek.
But someday I might try to learn “Clockwork Orange”-english, for kicks.
You who live in the sea of english might have no problem understanding it, but I couldn’t catch up what they were gibberishing.
But someday I might try to learn “Clockwork Orange”-english, for kicks.
It’s not that hard. Just read the book about 3 times and watch the movie occasionally and you will start speaking it in no time at all. It should come easy seeing as how it really is just English, with a bit of Russian, Spanish, Cockney, and who knows what else thrown in.
Well, I do know a little Elvish, although I refuse to watch the movies, for my own reasons. But I’ve loved Tolkien and his works for years, long before the movies came out. The languages are really rather complex, although based on English (are you sure about that? I don’t mean the movie languages, I mean the book languages…), and I enjoy playing with them. I am the only person I know who has read, understood, and enjoyed the Silmarillion…
So, yes, I do speak them a little bit.
Tolkien, it must be remembered, was One Of Us. A classicist. Actually, a philologist. All the books he wrote were to give a history to his language creations. He knew full well what history does to a language.
Ardalambion is the very best web resource for Tolkien linguistics. There is also a huge Quenya primer.
Quenya is supposed to look like a cross between Finnish and Latin. Dead, learned language for scholarly Elves.
Sindarin is supposed to look like Welsh. That’s the language used day to day, and in the films.
As a language creator myself, I consider Tolkien something of a patron saint, even if I find his fiction a bit too regressive for comfort.
I once asked a Finnish friend if he knew any Elvish and he replied that he could manage “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and I could drum along.
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Well, I do know a little Elvish, although I refuse to watch the movies, for my own reasons.
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I would really like to hear those reasons. The movies are splendid.
Sindarin Elvish is extremely simple, I have a very short grammar however it lacks organised vocabulary. Conjunctions for example in the word list are scattered amongst many types of wine.
I haven’t tried to learn any Elvish, though I do know a few people who have learned it and quite a few who tried to learn it but failed .
I don’t think I will ever try to learn the lanugage myself, although I really like the books (The Hobbit was in fact the first book I ever read).
At the moment I’m reading the Silmarillion (loads of people have read it here… maybe it’s not a very common book in the US. Some americans were moaning in a forum some time ago, that they were having trouble finding the book, but that was before the films… ::))
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I don’t think I will ever try to learn the lanugage myself, although I really like the books (The Hobbit was in fact the first book I ever read).
Really? 
I didn’t know about the Hobbit when I first learned to read; I was eight before a friend loaned me her copy, and it was about another year before I could find the other books. (There are actually six books, seven including The Hobbit; it’s not a trilogy, and was never meant to be. I suspect it was meant to be, in format, more like the seven-book “Chronicles of Narnia,” which was written by his close friend C. S. Lewis. (Another classicist, and very good with languages!) The Chronicles of Narnia were the first books I ever read-the first of any length, anyway.)
At the moment I’m reading the Silmarillion (loads of people have read it here… maybe it’s not a very common book in the US. Some americans were moaning in a forum some time ago, that they were having trouble finding the book, but that was before the films… ::))
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I found my copy-rather, my sister found it and bought it for me-before the films, but it was more of a “happened to find it” sort of thing than actually looking for it.
I had to buy the Silmarillion, because my mum had lost her copy…
I would love to learn Quenya, but for some reason I stopped and haven’t learned anything for months. It is a very beautiful language. I think the more languages people create, the more linguistic discoveries we find, don’t you think?
hey William, you said that you create languages. Would you mind sharing with us what kind of languages you create? I tried to (influenced by Tolkien by the way) create a language but I sucked and eventually gave up (my picture is actually of the writing system for the world I created).
Mostly what you learn is that somewhere, someone is speaking a natural language doing the same crazy thing you thought you were inventing. It’s amazing the things some languages encode. Some languages, for example, encode the color of the direct object for certain verbs with an infix to the verb.
hey William, you said that you create languages. Would you mind sharing with us what kind of languages you create? I tried to (influenced by Tolkien by the way) create a language but I sucked and eventually gave up (my picture is actually of the writing system for the world I created).
My magnum opus, alluded to somewhere else in the vast fields of textkit conversations, is Vaior. Here’s a very small bit of Aesop:
Sersi siothatiesse coldauai vam dúelte oceninauaith túirru saivalalle. Cervi unchineran ocaith evarai na enneraste, “tuerho va, tíar aitothir ach pitothir thiuhen lu vatauo sir iell saivalall fidalle.” Ravothir evarai nir, “rafcenaith min saivalan, sihaunai uri sa. Haudeiai ta mir saivalall haspitalle, taul imsauo mir.”
So, there is a clear debt to Tolkien in terms of phonesthetics. I once described the language as being like Esperanto invented by speaker of Classical Greek who lived among the Inuit and thought Quenya sounded nice.
Someone who knows classical Greek will see many familiar things in the grammar: several verb moods, postpositive particles, a love of participle phrases. Other things will come as shock, mostly in terms of word construction and derivation, but it reflects a great deal of Greek.
Once I decided to devote myself more seriously to Greek, Vaior development slowed down. One friend of mine is a little irritated about this, since he thinks the word-building capabilites of Vaior are cool.
I’ll be sticking with Greek, I think, for the forseeable future.
You made your own language? That’s insane! Incredible…
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:o You made your own language? That’s insane! Incredible…
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Not really. Well, perhaps insane. But not incredible: do a google on “conlang” or “constructed language” and you will find quite a lot of people share the hobby. The guy at http://www.zompist.com/ has made many, many languages under the “Virtual Verduria” link.
You planning on inventing a history to go with that language and then writing a book?
I once tried to build a alphabet for all languages.
It started from the depicting of the phonetic organs - the oral cavity, tongue, nasal symbols, that represented the positions and natures of the phonetic values. And with some simplification and cursive styles it ended up with 64 characters set. but with lack of linguistic and phonetic samples it turned out far behind a all-tongue-ish.