Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Glossopoeia, the construction of languages, was Tolkien's hobby for most of his life. [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. Tolkien stated that this was not his first effort in invented languages.
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]
In addition to Tolkien's original lexicon, many fans have contributed words and phrases, attempting to create a language that can be fully used in reality. [ 4 ] Other Elvish languages
Tolkien, he writes, believed that "untranslated elvish would do a job that English could not". [6] Shippey notes, too, that Tolkien is recorded as saying that "cellar door" sounded more beautiful than the word "beautiful"; [6] the phrase had however been admired by others from at least 1903. [10]
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 ...
One of these languages was created in around 1915, inspired by the Celtic languages, particularly Literary Welsh. Tolkien called it Goldogrin or "Gnomish" in English. He wrote a substantial dictionary of Gnomish and a grammar. [T 2] This is the first conceptual stage of the Sindarin language.
Tolkien went on to create his first novel "The Hobbit" published in 1937. Almost twenty years later, the sequel "The Lord of the Rings" followed in three volumes, in 1954 and 1955.
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]