Languages constructed by Tolkien
The English philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien created several constructed languages, mostly related to his fictional world of Middle-earth.
Inventing languages, something that he called glossopoeia (paralleling his idea of mythopoeia or myth-making), was a lifelong occupation for Tolkien, starting in his teens.
Scholars such as Carl F. Hostetter, David Salo and Elizabeth Solopova have published grammars and studies of the languages.
He created a large family of Elvish languages, the best-known and most developed being Quenya and Sindarin.
[1][2] At a little over 13, he helped construct a sound substitution cypher known as Nevbosh,[T 1] 'new nonsense', which grew to include some elements of actual invented language.
[3] In 1931, Tolkien gave a lecture about his passion for constructed languages, titled A Secret Vice.
The lecture also discusses Tolkien's views on phonaesthetics, citing Greek, Finnish, and Welsh as examples of "languages which have a very characteristic and in their different ways beautiful word-form".
It was this idea that an "Elvish language" must be associated with a complex history and mythology of the Elves that was at the core of the development of Tolkien's legendarium.
Tolkien wrote in one of his letters: what I think is a primary 'fact' about my work, that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration.
[T 7] Tolkien based Quenya pronunciation more on Latin than on Finnish, though it has elements derived from both languages.
Thus, Quenya lacks the vowel harmony and consonant gradation present in Finnish, and accent is not always on the first syllable of a word.
Typical Finnish elements like the front vowels ö, ä and y are lacking in Quenya, but phonological similarities include the absence of aspirated unvoiced stops or the development of the syllables ti > si in both languages.
[11] The combination of a Latin basis with Finnish phonological rules resulted in a product that resembles Italian in many respects, which was Tolkien's favourite modern Romance language.
Tolkien wrote that he gave Sindarin "a linguistic character very like (though not identical with) British-Welsh ... because it seems to fit the rather 'Celtic' type of legends and stories told of its speakers".
Early Sindarin formed plurals by the addition of -ī, which vanished but affected the preceding vowels (as in Welsh and Old English): S. Adan, pl.
[13] Tolkien devised Adûnaic (or Númenórean), the language spoken in Númenor, shortly after World War II, and thus at about the time he completed The Lord of the Rings, but before he wrote the linguistic background of the Appendices.
It is there that the most extensive sample of the language is found, revealed to one of the (modern-day) protagonists, Lowdham, of that story in a visionary dream of Atlantis.
[15] That in turn is the Old English word þéoden,[16] meaning "leader of a people", "king" or "prince".
As the Ents were first taught to speak by Elves, Entish appears related to the Elvish languages.
Even the Elves, master linguists, could not learn Entish, nor did they attempt to record it because of its complex sound structure:[T 16] ... slow, sonorous, agglomerated, repetitive, indeed long-winded; formed of a multiplicity of vowel-shades and distinctions of tone and quantity which even the loremasters of the Eldar had not attempted to represent in writing[T 16]To illustrate these properties, Tolkien provides the word a-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lindor-burúme, meaning hill.
He described the finding of a Finnish grammar book as "like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before".
[T 18] Finnish morphology, particularly its rich system of inflection, in part gave rise to Quenya.
This seemed a clever solution, as it allowed him to explain the book's use of Modern English as representing Westron.
[34] Internet mailing lists and forums that have been dedicated to Tolkien's constructed languages include Tolklang, Elfling and Lambengolmor.
