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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]
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).
Shippey gives as one example Tolkien's statement that he had used such names as Bree, Archet, Combe, and Chetwood for the small area, outside the Shire, where Hobbits and Men lived together. Tolkien selected them for their non-English elements so that they would sound "queer", with "a style that we should perhaps vaguely feel to be 'Celtic'". [6]
Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim view of auxiliary languages: in 1930 a congress of Esperantists were told as much by him, in his lecture A Secret Vice, [167] "Your language construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he had concluded that "Volapük, Esperanto ...
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]
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 Etymologies is J. R. R. Tolkien's etymological dictionary of his constructed Elvish languages, written during the 1930s.As a philologist, he was professionally interested in the structure of languages, the relationships between languages, and in particular the processes by which languages evolve.