Quote from: Mingshey
I once tried to build a alphabet for all languages.
This should come close (although it’s not complete either):
http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/fullchart.html<br />It’s the alphabet of the International phonetic association.
Ingrid
[quote author=ingrid70 link=board=6;threadid=618;start=15#5979 date=1063484890]
Quote from: Mingshey
I once tried to build a alphabet for all languages.
This should come close (although it’s not complete either):
http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/fullchart.html<br />It’s the alphabet of the International phonetic association.
Ingrid
[/quote]
Yes, I met the table before.
An afterthought: many nations have phonemes for different sets of phonetic values. That adds the difficulty in trying to make an all-tonguish alphabet. japanese and korean ‘r’ is close to ‘d’ or ‘t’ in english in the position of the tongue. The ‘t’ in ‘data’ as spoken by americans is heard as ‘r’ in korea. Thus if universal phonetic symbol is used, there’s always a problem in consistent transcription.
[quote author=Episcopus link=board=6;threadid=618;start=15#5969 date=1063454831]
:o You made your own language? That’s insane! Incredible…
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Neither insane nor incredible, Episcopus, just very, very time-consuming.
I also tried my hand at a language; it goes with one of my fantasy stories. I was also influenced by Tolkien (I call it Elquet, although that probably won’t be it’s name when (if?) I get it finished…). When I started it, however, I was very young, and had a very poor idea of grammatical principles, and vocabulary was tricky for me…I took to jotting down pretty-sounding groups of letters whenever I stumbled across them, to use for building words. (Okay, so maybe it is insane. ;D)
I’ve been trying for some time to work out an alphabet for it, but the letters I have right now are too complicated to write easily, and I have a different letter for every sound I use in the language, including a different one for long “a”, short “a”, etc., which seemed like a good idea at the time, but now seems like overkill.
I don’t have any pictures on the computer, or I could show you…
Serena ravlia tuo sere, le chav Ellon ex accro tuo le eri tuo.
Traditional Elquet farewell. (I used to use that for my email signature.)
Keesa
Funny-when I posted it and looked closely at it, it looks as though it has heavy Latin influence, too, but at the time I knew no Latin and almost no French.
[quote author=Emma_85 link=board=6;threadid=618;start=15#5973 date=1063457445]
You planning on inventing a history to go with that language and then writing a book? 
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Nope. I’ve never really been interested in the conculture aspect of language creation. As a result most of my languages encode my own worldview pretty heavily. Not a single word relating to religion appeared in Vaior until a friend pointed out the absence of vocabulary to even talk about the subject.
Mine doesn’t have the words to discuss religion because I haven’t gotten that far in it yet, but like yours, it incoporates my own views…the sample above says, “Farewell wherever you fare, and may Ellon [God] be with you and guide you.”
[quote author=klewlis link=board=6;threadid=618;start=0#5803 date=1063290399]
[quote author=Keesa link=board=6;threadid=618;start=0#5771 date=1063280676]
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.
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Klewlis…have you read the books? The movies are horrible compared with them, I have to think of them as two different things to even stand what Hollywood has done…
As far as Elvish goes, I can say a few things, like Ellen Sila Lumen Omentievo(sp) and Namarie(sp) and I can quote anything spoken in elvish in the movies.
How can you say the movies are horrible if you refuse to watch them? Or did you watch them and now you refuse to watch them again?
Different people talking here. ;D I refuse to watch them; Puella Parva watches them and says they’re horrible compared with the books. ;D
Yes, my uncle has taken me to see them, and I have a VHS of the first one and a DVD of the second. I don’t think they’re good Tolkien movies, but they’re very good action movies. Just not done right.
I thought there were some important parts missing the in the first movie, but I liked it a lot anyway. It’s much better in the extended super DVD version, though. Now I’m just waiting for the extended version of the 2nd one and I hope they treated Faramir better in that version.
Yeah, really. I like the extended version too. I watch my brother’s copies. 
[quote author=Emma_85 link=board=6;threadid=618;start=15#6285 date=1064004134]
I thought there were some important parts missing the in the first movie, but I liked it a lot anyway. It’s much better in the extended super DVD version, though. Now I’m just waiting for the extended version of the 2nd one and I hope they treated Faramir better in that version.
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They might add up some of the missing parts, but I don’t expect they would change the characters. 
Look how Pippin is treated as an all-thumbs dummy dumb.
I read most of LOTR, but I didn’t bother trying to understand Tolkien’s languages. I get the feeling that I missed the whole point. Perhaps I will look at Quenya sometime.
I also think the movies suck, but that’s another topic.
[quote author=mingshey link=board=6;threadid=618;start=30#6415 date=1064195015]
[quote author=Emma_85 link=board=6;threadid=618;start=15#6285 date=1064004134]
I thought there were some important parts missing the in the first movie, but I liked it a lot anyway. It’s much better in the extended super DVD version, though. Now I’m just waiting for the extended version of the 2nd one and I hope they treated Faramir better in that version.
[/quote]
They might add up some of the missing parts, but I don’t expect they would change the characters.
Look how Pippin is treated as an all-thumbs dummy dumb.
[/quote]
I agree! They had no right to do that, he’s a hobbit, and most hobbits are smart-and he’s one of the smartest!
mingshey: I never tried to learn Quenya or Sindarin, but did learn the Tengwar, and used it to transliterate notes for myself on school desktops (in pencil), which sometimes came in useful… (Those of you who are still in school, please don’t emulate my bad example!) I haven’t seen any of the Jackson movies. The IPA has diacritics for creating “narrow” transcriptions of speech, so that information on lip-rounding, tongue location, &c. can be specified to the desired degree of detail.
Keesa: I read and enjoyed the Silmarillion, but I can’t be sure that I understood everything that Professor Tolkien wanted to communicate. Yes, the distinction between “book” and “volume” is often blurred.
xn
I’m glad someone started to reply on an old post like this one. It’s funny; I go back and enjoy reading really old posts. It’s interesting to read all the original gansta’s very early postings here. I wanted to bring some back, but just thought it was awkward to do so. Anyway, I’m more interested in learning about his language influences and the process of creating his languages. The main language influences that I read were Finnish and Welsh. But people bring up Gothic, Old Norse, and even Latin? I read that Latin only had an “ocular” resemblance to one of his elvish languages. I realize he was a philologist and there probably were subtle influences from the languages that he studied, but I don’t know how much influence they had on his elvish languages… Is there a book or article that elaborates more about his language creation process/technique and his linguistic influences on his main fictional languages?
I remember seeing a book somewhere on Tolkien’s languages; I think it was one of those compilations of notes by his son. Anyway, it had a fairly straightforward title like The Languages of Tolkien or somesuch.
You might wish to try looking up keywords on Amazon…
I think it was one of those compilations of notes by his son.
Just did a search now and can’t find anything by Christopher other than middle-earth history and such. I did find the book you mentioned though. The review in amazon mentioned a book by Christopher as well, so I think it does exisit. Oh well, will dig further later. Thanks. 
I have the book, it is “The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth”, by Ruth S. Noel, and it is quite interesting. I almost forgot I’d been reading it I’ve been doing so much math and biology… 
It is, alas, also riddled with errors. Of course, it was the only thing available for quite a while, and I certainly have a copy of it my constructed languages section.