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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.
The Elvish languages are a family of several related languages and dialects. In 1937, Tolkien drafted the Lhammas and The Etymologies, both edited and published in the 1987 The Lost Road and Other Writings. They depict a tree of languages analogous to that of the Indo-European languages that Tolkien knew as a philologist. [2] [6]
Khuzdul (pronounced) is a fictional language created by J. R. R. Tolkien, one of the languages of Middle-earth, specifically the secret and private language of the Dwarves. He based its structure and phonology on Semitic languages, primarily Hebrew, with triconsonantal roots of words. Very little is known of the grammar.
The languages were the first thing Tolkien created for his mythos, starting with what he originally called "Qenya", the first primitive form of Elvish. This was later called Quenya (High-elven) and is one of the two most complete of Tolkien's languages (the other being Sindarin , or Grey-elven).
Tolkien hints at true names in a few places in his Middle-earth writings. Thus, the Ent or tree-giant Treebeard says in The Two Towers that "Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language", [8] while in The Hobbit, the Wizard Gandalf introduces himself with the statement "I am Gandalf, and Gandalf means me". [8]
Middle-earth Elvish and Indo-European language [12] trees compared. Tolkien, a philologist, was intensely interested in the evolution of language families, and modelled his fictional languages and their evolution on real ones. [13] The language names and evolution shown for Middle-earth are as used in the Lhammas. [8]
Tolkien was not the first author to create fictional worlds, as George MacDonald and H. Rider Haggard had done so, and were praised for their "mythopoeic" gifts by Tolkien's friend and fellow-Inkling C. S. Lewis. [19] Tolkien however went much further, spending many years developing what has been called a mythology for England, starting in 1914.
Tolkien further stated that he had given 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", i.e. that he envisaged a "fit" between the language, the character of his Sindarin Elves, and the people in Celtic legends.