Sindarin as a linguistic phenomenon

 

Contents

Introduction…………………………………………….3

Chapter 1. Theoretical aspects of the investigation of the Elvish languages………………………………………………………...5

1. The outer history: J.R.R. Tolkien as a philologist…………...5
2. The history of the Elvish scholarship………………………..9
3. The classification of the Elvish languages…………………11

Chapter 2. Primitive Elvish as a linguistic phenomenon……...17

2.1 Structure of words in Primitive Elvish……………………..17

2.2 Phonology of Primitive Elvish……………………………..28

2.3 Grammar of Primitive Elvish………………………………31

Chapter 3. Quenya as a linguistic phenomenon……………….34

3.1 Phonology of Quenya……………………………………....34

3.2 Grammar of Quenya………………………………………..37

Chapter 4. Sindarin as a linguistic phenomenon……………...48

4.1 Phonology of Primitive Elvish……………………………..48

4.2 Grammar of Primitive Elvish……………………………....51

Conclusion………………………………………………….….64

Bibliography…………………………………………………..67

Appendixes…………………………………………………….69

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

This graduate work is called “The Elvish languages as linguistic phenomena”. Here we have examined two of the most popular Elvish languages and their predecessor that were created by professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Every year there appear more and more fans of his great works and mostly all of them are interested in his created languages and want to learn and speak them. Moreover, a lot of scholars are attracted by them and they made researches on this topic. For the most part these scholars are from Norway, Germany and England. In Russia there are a few of them due to the fact that the appearance of these books is quite late and the Russian people knew about Tolkien in 1969 from the articles in British journal that was published in Soviet Union, though the first adequate translation appeared in 1992 but still there is no canonical translation of his writings, only seven official. In addition we should notice that even not all of his significant works have been translated. There is also another reason for such poor investigations of Tolkien works – Russian scholars pay more attention to the difficulties of translation, they study the character of them and, as a result, there are no fundamental, resumptive works.

The aim of this work is to study and systematize all the information known about these languages and to present it in more suitable way than it is given in most of the books on Elvish. There are few objects of investigation in this work: these objects are the languages of the Elves. The subject of the investigation is the structure of the languages.

The methods of the investigation are the following:

1. to find the most important literature concerning the Elvish languages;
2. to systematize this information;
3. to observe the development of the languages from the old period to modern;
4. to investigate the system of the languages and to try to compare it with the system of  the “real” languages;
5. to work with dictionaries of these invented languages;
6. to sum up all the material and present it in a suitable way.

This graduate work consists of four chapters. In the first chapter we have observed the biography of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and tried to find out the reasons of this hobby (inventing of the languages) and why did he based Quenya and Sindarin on the most difficult and sophisticated languages: Finnish and Welsh. In this chapter we have also examined the most important works on Tolkien’s languages and found some journals concerning them and made a review of all the Elvish languages that Tolkien invented for his mythology.

In the second chapter we have investigated and made a brief survey of the history and development of the first Elvish language – Primitive Elvish. Also we have investigated the structure of words of this language, described the functions of the sounds, their changes in different environment. We also have classified words of the language according to their belonging to certain parts of speech and described them.

In the third chapter we have investigated the “language of lore”, the noble tongue of the Elves – Quenya. Here we also have presented some historical facts about the language, described phonology and its development during the Three Ages of the World, pointed to the traces of the primitive language (they have much in common), described all the parts of speech and their modifications, pointed out the features of the language that are similar to English.

In the fourth chapter we have investigated the language, that was developed in Middle-earth and that was a spoken language of the Elves of those lands - Sindarin. As in the previous chapters, we gave some historical facts concerning this language, described its phonology, the changes it underwent during the Three Ages and grammar (grammatical categories, parts of speech, inflections, modifications, etc).

In the appendices we have presented mostly all the examples of Tolkien’s writings in these languages. However, there is also not a little amount of poems and writings, made by Tolkienists themselves.

 

Chapter 1. Theoretical aspects of the investigation of the Elvish languages

1. The outer history: J. R. R. Tolkien as a philologist

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is a famous writer, the author of such bestsellers as The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion. Everyone knows him because of these books but not all of them know that he also was a philologist and the languages that we study here are not just primitive things that some storytellers and game makers do, but a serious scholar work. The languages of the Elves, especially Quenya and Sindarin, are the most developed and shaped. They have the most complete structure. Professor Tolkien worked on them during all his life. But what was the purpose of it? How did he make them? Why only two of the great numbers are developed? We try to answer these questions when studying his biography concerning the philological facts.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was bred by his mother. She made a lot of things for him and the most essential were home-studies. “His favourite lessons were those concerning languages”. She introduced him to the rudiments of Latin. Ronald was “interested in the sounds, the shapes of words and in their meaning” [2, p.29, 30]. French he didn’t like. He eventually found the existence of the Welsh language when was walking along the railway.

The next step was King Edward’s School where he began to study Greek and continued the studies of Latin. Here began his looking for the bones of the languages. In fact, he started to study philology – the science of words. During this period he got acquainted with Spanish, Anglo-Saxon and Old-Norse (Old Icelandic). It was a deep love for the look and the sound of words and as a result of it he started to invent his own languages [2, p.43].

The first steps were made in Nevbosh or the New Nonsense. It was developed to chant limericks in it. The only one example of it was found:

 

  Dar fys ma vel gom co palt: “Hoc

Pys go iskili far maino woc?”   

Pro si go fys do roc de 

Do can ym maino bocte

De volt fact soc ma taimful gyroc!

 

       There was an old man who said: “How

        Can I possibly carry my cow?”

        For it were to ask it

        To get in my basket

       It would make such a terrible row! [2, p.44]

 

This language is based on English, French and Latin in disguise.

When he started to learn Greek he entertained himself by making – up Greek-style words. But he wanted to make more sophisticated language on an organized basis and decided to take an existing language as a model or as a starting point. He began to work on Naffarin. It showed a great deal of Spanish influence but it had its own system of phonology and grammar.

Ronald might have developed it still further had he not discovered Gothic language. He invented “extra” gothic words to fill gaps in the limited vocabulary that survived. He started to work on invented alphabets, organized “historical” system. One of his school notebooks contains a system of code-symbols for each letter of the English alphabet. This occupied him most until he entered Oxford.

In Oxford he was bored by Latin and Greek and was excited by Germanic literature. He managed to find books in medieval Welsh and loved the appearance and sound of the words. Also he discovered the Finnish language. Later he recalled: “It was like discovering of wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me” [2, p.67]. He abandoned Gothic and began to create a private language that was heavily influenced by Finnish. This language would eventually emerge in “Quenya” or “High-Elven”. At that time he extended his knowledge in Old and Middle English and found a group of religious poems of Cynewulf. Few lines from them impressed him greatly and it was a starting point for

his future works. By 1915 Tolkien had developed Quenya or how he called it “My Nonsense Fairy Language” [2] to a degree of some complexity. He felt it was a “mad hobby” and scarcely expected to find an audience for it. He understood that this language should live and needs someone to speak it. Tolkien perfected it and decided to whom it belonged. Sometimes he even wrote poems in it. Here is a part of one of them, dated: “November 1915, March 1916”. No translation survived but the translation of two words is known: Lasselanta – leaf-fal or autumn and Eldamar – the elvenhome in the West.

Ai lintulinda Lasselanta

Pilingeve suyer nalla ganta

Kuluvi ya karnevalinar

V’ematte singi Eldamar [2]

During 1915 Ronald Tolkien discovered that Quenya was spoken by the fairies or Elves. From now he was busy finding out the history of the Elves, where did they come from and how they began to speak Quenya. He paid great attention to their names, carefully constructed them.

By 1917 Tolkien’s “Nonsense Fairy Language” had become very sophisticated, possessed a vocabulary of many hundreds of words. It    was derived as any “real” language would have been: from a primitive language supposedly spoken in an earlier age. From this Primitive Eldarian (Eldar means the Firstborn or Elvenkind) Tolkien created a second Elvish language, contemporary with Quenya but spoken by different peoples of the Elves. It was later called “Sindarin” or “Grey Elven” and its phonology was based on the second Tolkien’s favourite language after Finnish, Welsh. Besides Quenya and Sindarin, Tolkien invented a number of other Elvish languages. They were not as sophisticated as the former but still they occupied much of his mind [9].

The Elvish names were constructed almost from Quenya and Sindarin. It is impossible to give an adequate account of how they were constructed but in brief it happened like this: Tolkien at first decided what the name should mean, then developed its form in one language than in another. Sometimes he constructed a name

that sounded appropriate to the character without paying much attention to its meaning because it sounded well. But later such names were dismissed and Tolkien tried to discover how they could have reached their strange, inexplicable form.  As the years went by he concerned his invented languages as “real” and stories as historical chronicles. As a result he said not “This is not as I wish it to be; I must change it” but “What does that mean? I must find out”. He strongly believed that he is not an inventor of something, but just as discoverer of the lost languages and myths [2, p.101].

In 1919 Tolkien began to use an alphabet, which looked like a mixture of three ancient languages (Hebrew, Greek and Pitman’s shorthand), later it evolved into “The Alphabet of Rúmil” in his diaries. He was a restless perfectionist and couldn’t decide its final form. Due to this perfectionism the final version hasn’t been achieved and his son, after Ronald’s death, accepted the last version.

Ronald Tolkien did a lot concerning languages, made them more perfect, but still not full, owing to the fact that he didn’t want to accept the words which were not concerned with nature, Old England which he loved so much. That is the main reason why these languages lack of words to communicate though people form new words on the basis of the existing ones.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. The history of the Elvish scholarship

Although the study of Tolkien’s languages is, as a rule, not taken seriously by mainstream linguistics, the number of serious scholars has worked on their studies. An early book dedicated to Eldarin is “An Introduction to Elvish” by Jim Allan. In this book the author gave a very good description of Quenya and Sindarin phonology, a little information on history of the languages and some notes about the main parts of speech. He made a great contribution to Elvish linguistics. The book was first published in 1978, reprinted in 1983, 1987, 1995, 2001, 2002, and 2003.

The next book concerning the Elvish languages is “The evolution from Primitive Elvish to Quenya” by Helge Kare Fauskanger, the Norwegian scientist, the founder of the first and the most popular web site of the Elvish languages – Ardalambion. In this book he made a deep investigation of Elvish phonology in historical sense: he described all the way of development of the language phonological changes from the first primitive stage till the one in which Quenya is in the present moment. This book and the previous one were the most important sources of Quenya phonology (except Tolkien’s descriptions in the Appendices of the Lord of the Rings, Silmarillion and the History of Middle-earth) for this graduate work.

The next important work in the Elvish languages is “Quetin i lambё Eldaiva ein Quenya-Sprachkurs” of the german linguist Thorsten Renk. This work is also one of the best contributions to Elvish linguistics, though it wasn’t translated in any language and exists only in german. Thorsten Renk investigated Quenya grammar: a little bit of adjectives and a deep investigation of Quenya verbs and its forms. Unfortunately, we don not know, when it was published at first, but the latest publication goes back to 2004.

During the work on this paper we have found a lot of dictionaries of Elvish languages: Sindarin-Polski-English and Polski-Sindarin, Quenya-French and French-Quenya, English-Quenya and Quenya-English dictionaries and also with many more real languages. Sindarin has mostly the same variety of dictionaries as Quenya has.

In Great Britain few magazines concerning the Elvish languages are published every month. The first one and the most prominent is Parma Eldalamberon. Parma Eldalamberon, “The Book of Elven-tongues”, is a journal of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, a special interest group of the Mythopoeic Society.  It presents previously unpublished writings by J. R. R. Tolkien concerning his Elvish languages, early versions of his invented scripts, investigations and deep analysis of the texts.  These have been edited and annotated by Christopher Gilson, Arden R. Smith and Patrick H. Wynne, under the guidance of Christopher Tolkien and with the permission of the Tolkien Estate.

The Vinyar Tengwar is the second magazine concerning these languages. Vinyar Tengwar is a linguistic journal published by the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, dedicated to the scholarly study of the invented languages of J.R.R. Tolkien. “Vinyar” is the plural of “vinya” - "new", and “Tengwar” means "letters". Despite the incorrectness of the title, it was kept for old times' sake.

Vinyar Tengwar first appeared in 1988, at first edited by Jorge Quiñonez and later taken over by Carl F. Hostetter. It appeared in bimonthly intervals at first, but after July 1994, issues appeared more irregularly, roughly once a year. This coincided with the greater frequency of publication of texts written by Tolkien himself; the journal is now dedicated primarily to such texts. Several of these texts were mentioned in volumes of The History of Middle-earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien, but not published in that series owing to their specialist or recondite nature.

The professional studying of Tolkien’s works (as the “tolkienists” like to say – academic) in Russia began in 1981, when there appeared the article of L.S. Koshelev called “The character of J.R.R.Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings””. Thus, this year Russian tolkienism celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. This scholar wrote many other investigations. Moreover, he defended the first thesis on Tolkien in USSR. Also we

can point to the author of the second thesis on Tolkien R.I.Kabakov and to the works of Apenko. In the ninetieth there appeared a number of students’ graduate works, thesises of S.A.Luzina, articles of Shurmil, O.L.Kabachek, and S.B.Lihachev. As we

can judge, the number of works on Tolkien increased in the nineties. We may assert that in Russia his works achieved versatile and deep interpretation, though we still cannot speak about some fundamental works of resumptive character.

3. Classification of the Elvish languages

As it was said, J.R.R. Tolkien invented several languages for the Elves. In his mythology these languages originated as follows [according to 27]

Time period	Language
The Awakening	Primitive Quendian (the language of the Elves in Cuiviénen)
The Westward March	Avarin and various Avarin languages (the language of those who stayed in Cuiviénen and spread across Middle-earth from there)
	Common Eldarin (the early language of all the Eldar)
	Common Telerin (Teleri during the March)
The First Age	Quenya: Quendya or Vanyarin Quenya (daily tongue of the Vanyar, closest to archaic Quenya) Noldorin or Exilic Quenya (the “Elven-Latin” of Middle-earth)
	Telerin (the language of the Teleri who reached the Undying Lands (Valinor))
	Nandorin (the language of the Teleri in Nandor(Lindon), Rhovanion and Eriador)
	Sindarin: Teleri in Beleriand (Sindar), as well as the exiled Noldor after the speaking of Quenya was banned. Doriathrin (dialect o Doriath) Falathrin (dialect of Falas and Nargothrond) North Sindarin (dialects of Dorthonion and Hithlum)
The Second Age	Quenya and its dialects
	Telerin and its dialects
	Sindarin and its dialects
	Nandorin
	Silvan (the language of the Wood Elves of the Vale of Anduin)
The Third Age	Exilic Quenya
	Sindarin

 

Primitive Quendian is the first language of the Quendi (Elves), which they spoke soon after their Awakening. It will be mentioned further in the work. Primitive Quendian give birth to Avarin and Common Eldarin. Avarin is the language of those Elves who didn’t follow Oromë and stayed in Middle-earth. Those who went to Aman called them Avari or the Unwilling, but they continued to call themselves Quendi, “those who speak with voices”. According to the “War of Jewels” Avarin dialects were numerous. Though only few words about these six can be found in the there. Some Avarin tongues were evidently similar to the Eldarin ones. The speech of the first Atani (Men) “resembled the Elven-tongue in many words and devices” [19, ch.17]. In these early days, this Elvish influence on the languages of Men could come only from Avarin. There are six descendants of the Avarin language in Middle-earth: Kindi, Cuind, Hwenti, Windan, Kinn-lai, and Penni [21, p.410]. Each of these forms belong to a separate Avarin language, probably there were many more. Let us now watch through the changes in these Avarin languages by comparing these forms with the Quenya word Quendi:

1. Kindi. In this form we can see the loss of “w” and the change from “e” to “i” by assimilation to the plural ending “i”. The same change also can be found in Quenya.
2. Cuind. “C” stands instead of “k”. The original ending has been lost (such change we can find in the later period in Quenya). The original semi-vowel “w” has turned into a full vowel “u” (this also occurs in Quenya).
3. Hwenti. Shows a change from “kw” to “hw” and from “d” to “t”. The original long final vowel “-í” was shortened to “-i”.
4. Windan. This form has lost the original initial “k”, turned “e” to “i” and strengthen the original second “e” to “a”. This Avarin language also introduced a new plural ending “-n”.
5. Kinn-lai. Perhaps closely related to the Kindi. We see here the change from “kwe” to “ki”, have assimilation of “nd” to “nn”. The last element “lai” which is derived from Primitive Quendian “liё” by A-infixion (very common in the primitive language) and by shortening of the final vowel.
6. Penni. It is a form especially interesting to Tolkien. It shows the change of “kw” to “p” as in Telerin. Also we can see the assimilation from “nd” to “nn” and the shortening of the final vowel. [ 21]