Growing up with language

The Shakespeare of model languages is J.R.R. Tolkien. His best-selling fantasy novel, The Lord Of The Rings, now considered a literary classic, achieved much of its believability from the depth of its invented languages: Quenya, Sindarin, Adu^naic and others. The following article provides a broad overview of Tolkien's seminal work with model languages.

He even had a part-time job as a lexicographer for the original Oxford English Dictionary -- the New English Dictionary, as it was known then. He worked for the dictionary in 1919-1920 and learned more about language than in any comparable period of his life. For instance, he had to develop the etymologies of words like water, wick and winter, and in so doing had to cite comparable forms in other languages like proto-Teutonic, Old Teutonic, Old Saxon, Middle Dutch, Modern Dutch, Old High German, Middle High German, Middle Low German, Modern German, Old Slavonic, Lithuanian, Russian and Latin. He did this commendably well; the head of the Dictionary, Dr. Henry Bradley, said of Tolkien, "His work gives evidence of an unusually thorough mastery of Anglo-Saxon and of the facts and principles of the comparative grammar of the Germanic languages. Indeed, I have no hesitation in saying that I have never known a man of his age who was in these respects his equal."

These were the natural languages that Tolkien learnt, and they served as an inspiration for his model languages.

As a child, Tolkien was first exposed to model languages when he learned a language his cousins had invented, called Animalic, which primarily consisted of English animal names. For instance, Dog nightingale woodpecker forty meant "You are an ass." Animalic served as an inspiration for Tolkien to create not just words, but his own language. He and one of his cousins created a more involved language than Animalic called Nevbosh (meaning New Nonsense) based on disguised pieces of English, Latin and French.

Nevbosh was his first attempt at creating an entire language. Already, when learning Greek, he had made up pseudo-Greek words, but Nevbosh went beyond that. Later, in his adolescence, Tolkien recalled Nevbosh and resolved to invent a serious language, one richly developed to model a natural language.

It is not surprising that Tolkien as a teenager attempted such an ambitious undertaking, given Tolkien's already established love of language. As Tolkien's biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, writes, "If he had been interested in music, he very likely would have wanted to compose melodies, so why should he not make up a personal system of words that would be, as it were, a private symphony?" Since Tolkien's education had been intensively centered around language, when he began to create, those creations took a linguistic form.

Tolkien's first serious model language was called Naffarin. It was strongly influenced by Spanish, but with its own phonology (sound structure) and grammar. Tolkien chose Spanish because his guardian (he had been orphaned at the age of twelve) was half-Spanish and had lent him books on that language, which Tolkien found attractive.

Naffarin was but the first of many model languages that Tolkien would create. His next language began after he had purchased a Gothic primer from a friend and become captivated by that language. Years later, in a letter to W.H. Auden, Tolkien wrote, "I discovered in it [Gothic] not only modern historical philology, which appealed to the historical and scientific side [of me], but for the first time the study of a language out of mere love: I mean for the acute aesthetic pleasure derived from a language for its own sake, not only free from being useful but free even from being the vehicle of a literature."

Since little of Gothic's vocabulary survives in its small corpus, Tolkien soon found himself inventing words to fill in the gaps. This in turn inspired him to create a hypothetical historical Germanic language, one hitherto never discovered but with established relationships to Old English, Gothic and other Germanic tongues.

From Naffarin and Neo-Gothic, Tolkien went on to create a new model language, inspired by Finnish. He had been studying for exams in the Exeter College library at Oxford when he first encountered Finnish. Years later, he compared the experience to tasting a fine wine: "It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me; and I gave up the attempt to invent an unrecorded Germanic language, and my own language -- or series of invented languages -- became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure." This was to become Quenya, his principal Elvish language, but elves had not yet entered the picture.

Chronological development of tolkien's principal model languages

• Nevbosh (inspired by English, French and Latin)
• Naffarin (inspired by Spanish)
• Neo-Gothic (filling holes in Gothic's vocabulary)
• "Unrecorded Germanic" (unnamed language related to Old English, Gothic and other Germanic tongues)
• Quenya (inspired by Finnish, influenced by Latin and Greek)
• Primitive Eldarin
• Sindarin (inspired by Welsh)

It so happened, at the age of 21, that he had an epiphany. He read for the first time the Old English religious poem Crist of Cynewulf. In it, he encountered two lines that were to fire his imagination for years: Eala Earendel engla beorhtast ofer middengeard monnum sended. "Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, above middle earth sent unto men." The words seemed to hint at something beautiful and remote. While the Old English dictionary recorded Earendel as a ray of light, Tolkien interpreted it literally as the star that heralded the dawn's light (Venus) and figuratively as John the Baptist, presaging Christ. In fact, Earendel heralded the light that would be diffused into the Two Trees, the Silmarils and the vial of Galadrial: all prominent works of light in his fiction. Tolkien wanted to discover the truth behind these two Old English lines, and he began to conceive of a greater story, involving a mariner. From this simple line about Earendel, the line itself "a leaf caught in the wind", Tolkien began to discover the great tree of his mythology, which would pass through many seasons, growing from "The Lay of Earendel" to The Book of Lost Tales to The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

As Tolkien wrote in his allegorical story "Leaf By Niggle", about a painter with a painting too detailed to ever finish:

There was one picture in particular which bothered him. It had begun with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots. Strange birds came and settled on the twigs and had to be attended to. Then all round the Tree, and behind it, through the gaps in the leaves and boughs, a country began to open out; and there were glimpses of a forest marching over the land, and of mountains tipped with snow.

By 1917, Tolkien had expanded Quenya to many hundreds of words and had even outlined its ancestral tongue, Primitive Eldarin. Primitive Eldarin then gave rise to another prominent elvish language, Sindarin, which was modelled on the Welsh language that had fascinated Tolkien from boyhood and which he had finally begun to study at Oxford.

While Quenya was originally patterned on Finnish, it was later influenced by Latin and Greek. Quenya and Sindarin were both intended to be of a European kind in style and structure (but not in specifics) and both were meant to satisfy Tolkien's aesthetic taste in sound structure. Sindarin, or Grey-elven, resembles Welsh phonologically and has a similar relationship to Quenya, or High-elven, as exists between British (meaning Celtic languages at the time of the Roman invasion) and Latin (both descended from Proto-Indo-European, as both Quenya and Sindarin were descended from Primitive Eldarin). The creation of Primitive Eldarin enabled Tolkien to later outline many other elvish languages, primarily as a backdrop for Quenya and Sindarin.

Tolkien had started out to create a language. He was now creating languages, peoples and a world.

Tolkien would often create a word by first starting with the needed meaning, then coming up with the forms as they would exist in Quenya and Sindarin. Other times, he would just make up a name in the heat of writing; later, he would either try and determine how the name had reached such a form or he would dismiss the form and come up with a new name. He viewed his languages as real languages that he was discovering, rather than inventing, and in one of his unfinished novels, The Lost Road, he has the protagonist, a philologist, gradually discover the lost words of a previously unknown tongue (Quenya or Sindarin), before being transported back into time towards the source of those words.

Characteristics of the Middle-Earth languages

Tolkien developed a very elaborate linguistic background for The Lord of the Rings, for it both as a hypothetically historical document and as an imagined world. He wrote the book as if it were the translation of an ancient manuscript, which he called the Red Book. The Red Book was written in a language called Westron, which was the tongue of the hobbits who narrated the tale. Tolkien decided that languages related to Westron would have to be translated into languages with equivalent relationships to English. The result is two layers of linguistic invention.

• The word mathom is used for a gift of dubious usefulness that one is reluctant to discard; Tolkien adapted it from the Old English mathm, "treasure".
• Another example is Thane, an inherited title of the leader of the Took clan of hobbits, adapted from the Old English thegn, a title for a noble who served an earl.
• The word orc is used to describe goblins and is from the Old English word for "demon", a word used in Beowulf.

One of the most interesting parts of Hobbit English isn't even used in the text of The Lord of the Rings, but is reserved for the appendices. Tolkien posed a linguistic what-if question: What if the Latin calendar's names for months hadn't supplanted the Anglo-Saxon names? What would the names of months look like in English then? The result is names like Afteryule for January and Blotmath for October, names true to the original forms. The fact that such details had to be crammed into an appendix illustrates how -- even though Tolkien was primarily interested in the languages -- he could subordinate that material to the story when appropriate, including it as notes rather than cluttering the story.

In ancient times, the hobbits lived near the riders of Rohan, whose language had changed little from those times. With Hobbit Westron now translated as English, to convey this relationship Tolkien translated the language of the Rohirrim (in the hypothetical manuscript) into words and names that were similar, though not exactly like, Old English words and names.

Since Tolkien conceived of the language of Dale and the Long Lake (regions in Middle Earth) as somewhat more removed from the hobbits' language, he represented it as Old Norse in a few names, primarily that of the dwarves. While dwarves had their own language, they considered their names private and adopted outward names that were common among the people they dwelt by.

Westron is descended from the human Adu^naic language, but almost all of the names in Gondor are Elvish, as a result of the long alliance between the men of Gondor and the elves in their wars against the dark powers.

The Elvish languages were of course the source of most of Tolkien's energies when it came to the creation of model languages. For these languages, Tolkien created a vocabulary of incredible detail. By 1938, he had prepared a base vocabulary of 800 root words of Primitive Eldarin, from which he could derive many other words for many other languages. For instance, the root *bes- meant "wed" and had descendents *besno/, "husband"; *besse/, "wife"; and *besu/, "husband and wife, married pair"; and *besta/, "matrimony". Each of these roots then had different descendants in different languages; the six known descendents of just *besno, "husband" are shown below.

Incidentally, the asterisk is a common philological symbol to indicate that there is no direct extant evidence that such a form existed but it is assumed to exist based on reconstruction from the available descendents. The asterisk is frequently used to indicate Indo-European roots, from which most European languages are descended. Tolkien used it to indicate that the root forms had been reconstructed by Elvish scholars.

Tolkien developed a regular system of sound change to govern how words were typically modified from Primitive Eldarin to the descendent languages. Sometimes these regular sound changes were overridden, as in Danian beorn, whose form developed idiosyncratically under the influence of *ber(n)o/, which had come to mean "man" by semantic change, broadening its meaning from "valiant man". Such an instance of semantic change demonstrates how richly Tolkien developed his model languages in order to make them more true to real life linguistic processes. After all, as his son Christopher Tolkien -- close confidant and later editor of many of his father's papers -- was to phrase it:

"He did not, after all, invent new words and names arbitrarily: in principle, he devised them from within the historical structure, proceeding from the bases or primitive stems, adding suffix or prefix or forming compounds, deciding (or, as he would have said, finding out) when the word came into the language, following through the regular changes of form that it would thus have undergone, and observing the possibilities of formal or semantic influence from other words in the course of its history. Such a word would then exist for him, and he would know it. As the whole system evolved and expanded, the possibilities for word and name became greater and greater." (Christopher Tolkien, The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 342)

As the cognate terms of besno/ imply, Tolkien had conceived of a complex tree of interrelated languages.

Tree of tongues: interrelationship of elvish languages

Valarin

Valinorian

Ingwiquenya
Quenya (Elf-latin)

Quendian

Lembian

*many dialects

Danian

Taliskan

tongues of Western men

Leikvian (East Danian)
*Ossiriandic

Eldarin

Koreldarin

*Lindarin
*Kornoldorin (Finrodian)
Noldirin (in Beleriand)

Telerin

*Telerin (in Valinor)

Beleriandic

*Doriathrin

*living language
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 196

Tolkien invented the most elaborate model language system ever published as part of a work of fiction. What had started out quite simple had grown. Yet, again and again, Tolkien failed to prepare a final grammar and lexicon for any of his languages. His goal was not to create a finished language system, but to simply delight in creating words and linguistic shapes in the fabric of an imagined time. The joy was in the finding.

Here is the most well known of Tolkien's Elvish poems. This is a hymn to Elbereth that was sung in the house of Elrond in The Fellowship Of The Ring:

A Elbereth Gilthoniel silivren penna miriel o menel aglar elenath! Na-chaered palan-díriel o galadhremmin ennorath Fanuilos le linnathon nef aear, si nef aearon!

"O Star-queen, Star-kindler, glittering down and sparkling like jewels from the firmanent's glory of the host of stars! To remote distance after having gazed from tree-woven middle-earth, Snow-white, to thee I will chant, on this side of the ocean, here on this side of the great ocean!"

Yet for him his model languages were an almost spiritual exercise as he followed his love of language and myth. He viewed his creation of languages as a Christian art, an act of subcreation that assisted the Lord in creating the world, perhaps creating even a part of heaven.

Tolkien's Niggle, once he had completed his "long" and "distasteful" journey (an allegory for death), at last found his way to a new country:

Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the Tree, and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide.
"It's a gift!" he said.

For further reading

Tolkien, Christopher; Ed. The Lost Road And Other Writings: Language And Legend Before 'The Lord Of The Rings'. Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1987. --About 50 pages of etymologies for Primitive Eldarin and its daughter tongues, providing a unique behind-the-scenes look at Quenya and Sindarin.

Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: A Biography. Ballantine Books: New York, 1978.

Carpenter, Humphrey; Ed. The Letters Of J.R.R. Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1981. --Tolkien discusses his languages and approach to creating them in some of these letters. One example, from a letter to Naomi Mitchison, 4/25/1954:
"Two of the Elvish tongues appear in this book... They are intended (a) to be definitely of a European kind in style and structure (not in detail); and (b) to be specially pleasant. The former is not difficult to achieve; but the latter is more difficult, since individual's personal predilections, especially in the phonetic structure of languages, varies widely, even when modified by the imposed languages (including their so-called native tongue).
"I have therefore pleased myself. The archaic language of lore is meant to be a kind of Elven-latin, and by transcribing it into a spelling closely resembling that of Latin (except that y is only used a consonant as y in E. Yes) the similarity to Latin has been increased ocularly. Actually it might be said to be composed on a Latin basis with two other (main) ingredients that happen to give me phonaesthetic pleasure: Finnish and Greek. It is however less consonantal than any of the three. This language is High-elven or in its own terms Quenya (Elvish)."