Elvish languages of Middle-earth
J. R. R. Tolkien began to construct his first Elvin tongue c. 1910–1911 while he was at the King Edward's School, Birmingham and which he later named Quenya (c. 1915).
At that time, Tolkien was already familiar with Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and three ancient Germanic languages: Gothic, Old Norse, and Old English.
It survives in some features: such as the absence of any consonant combinations initially, the absence of the voiced stops b, d, g (except in mb, nd, ng, ld, rd, which are favoured) and the fondness for the ending -inen, -ainen, -oinen, also in some points of grammar, such as the inflexional endings -sse (rest at or in), -nna (movement to, towards), and -llo (movement from); the personal possessives are also expressed by suffixes; there is no gender.
He usually started with the phonological system of the proto-language and then proceeded in inventing for each daughter language the many mechanisms of sound change needed.
[2] I find the construction and the interrelation of the languages an aesthetic pleasure in itself, quite apart from The Lord of the Rings, of which it was/is in fact independent.
Nelson Goering analysed this claim, finding it broadly reasonable, if the relationships are allowed to be of different kinds.
He came up with a radical solution: the Noldor adopted the local language, Sindarin, as spoken by the Sindar or Grey-Elves, when they settled in Beleriand.
[8] That allowed Noldorin to be, more plausibly, a scarcely-altered dialect of Quenya; and it freed up his linguistically-developed material to be rebadged as Sindarin, which would have had a long time to evolve in Middle-earth.
In his introduction to The Etymologies, Christopher Tolkien wrote that his father was "more interested in the processes of change than he was in displaying the structure and use of the languages at any given time.
These further subdivided as follows:[T 11] A tradition of philological study of Elvish languages exists within the fiction of Tolkien's frame stories: [T 13] The older stages of Quenya were, and doubtless still are, known to the loremasters of the Eldar.
[T 13]Elven philologists are called the Lambengolmor; in Quenya, lambe means "spoken language" or "verbal communication."
Known members of the Lambengolmor were Rúmil, who invented the first Elvish script (the Sarati), Fëanor who later enhanced and further developed this script into his Tengwar, which later was spread to Middle-earth by the Exiled Noldor and remained in use ever after, and Pengolodh, who is credited with many works, including the Osanwe-kenta and the Lhammas or "The 'Account of Tongues' which Pengolodh of Gondolin wrote in later days in Tol-eressëa".
[T 14] Tolkien wrote out most samples of Elvish languages with the Latin alphabet, but within the fiction he imagined many writing systems for his Elves.
A small fraction of Tolkien's accounts of Elvish languages was published in his novels and scholarly works during his lifetime.
