The Etymologies (Tolkien)
The list of words covers several of his minor languages as well as the two major ones, greatly extending the vocabularies known before it was published in The Lost Road and Other Writings in 1987.
From his schooldays, J. R. R. Tolkien was in his biographer John Garth's words "effusive about philology"; his schoolfriend Rob Gilson called him "quite a great authority on etymology".
[3] He created a family of invented languages for Elves, carefully designing the differences between them to reflect their distance from their imaginary common origin.
[6] The Etymologies has the form of a scholarly work listing the "bases" or "roots" of the protolanguage of the Elves: Common Eldarin and Primitive Quendian.
[7] Under each base, the next level of words (marked by an asterisk) are "conjectural", that is, not recorded by Elves or Men (it is not stated who wrote The Etymologies inside Middle-earth) but presumed to have existed in the proto-Elvish language.
"[8] This means that The Etymologies encapsulate a stage in Tolkien's development of his Elvish languages which precedes that assumed in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.
[9] Many of his suggestions were confirmed in 2003 and 2004, when Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick Wynne documented a substantial body of addenda and corrigenda to the published text in Vinyar Tengwar issues 45 and 46.
[10][11][12] With The Etymologies unpublished, Tolkien stated in a 1956 letter that his plans for the "specialist volume" of legendarium materials, which he had hoped to publish alongside The Lord of the Rings, were[T 4] largely linguistic.
[6]He writes in a 1967 letter that while he is pleased that readers are so interested in the names used in The Lord of the Rings, they "often neglect" the evidence he provided in the text and the appendices.
[T 5] He mentions that he has written a "commentary on the nomenclature for the use of translators"; and[T 5] Desirable would be an onomasticon giving the meaning and derivation of all names and indicating the languages that they belong to.
With Elvish he worked both backward and forward, to create "fitting names" with appropriate meanings, and to devise suitable etymologies for them in Quenya and Sindarin.
Smith gives as an example the Green-elves' Danian language: it consists of about "two dozen attested words" and a bit of phonological development, which indicates that its sound structure resembles that of Old English.
[6] In explanation, he 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", and that "the successive phases of their intricate evolution were the delight of their creator.
Dimitra Fimi notes that under the root GAT(H)-, Tolkien mentions the place-name "Garthurian", meaning 'a fenced realm' such as Doriath, or the secret Elvish city of Gondolin.
In that case, Fimi writes, Tolkien was making a "historical pun" – given that Beleriand was originally the Arthurian-sounding Broceliand (derived from the forest of Brocéliande) – and he was obliged to work backwards from there to invent some roots that fitted.
[13] Mark T. Hooker writes that the word-roots which Tolkien uses in The Etymologies owe something to Sanskrit, the ancient literary language of northern India.
[14] Hostetter, reflecting on half a century of Tolkienian linguistics, notes that in 1992 Anthony Appleyard used The Etymologies to attempt to systematise the grammar of Quenya for the first time.
