Re: Quenya Wikibook

Personally, I think Tolkien might have wished that Quenya be left
alone to develop on its own without such interventions as the Académie
Française has done for French. Besides, who really can definitively
say which version is correct? For all we know Tolkien might have
changed his mind rapidly in a short time, so that what looks like
concurrent, coexisting parts of Quenya are actually two variants.

Why not we just take it that each Quenya-speaker speaks his/her own
dialect, derived hypothetically from different time periods in the
language's development? Then perhaps in the future someone will revive
the idea of standardisation, it'll gain more traction, emulate Hebrew
and stuff, living the spirit of Tolkien, and in the end inspire
another instalment of LotR. Perhaps even replete with modernities like
parliamentary democracies and terms for "judicial review". (:

Eugene

2007/2/27, Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...>:
> Den 27. feb. 2007 kl. 13.32 skrev Mark J. Reed:
> >
> > I think the message is simple.  We can extrapolate
> > internally-consistent Elvish langs that agree with the attested
> > examples in LotR, but isuch constructs are quite unlikely to resemble
> > what Tolkien would have come up with if he could have stopped
> > tinkering long enough to complete his langs' descriptions.
>
> Tolkien is one of the few conlangers whose languages aren't dead just
> because his spirit has ceased to be physically active. But if anybody
> were to give it some work they would have to ask themselves whether
> the goal is to extrapolate an internally consistent language agreeing
> with any left behind Tolkien notes or to resemble anything Tolkien
> would have come up with if he had completed his descriptions, or
> perhaps to create something quite different based on his leftbehinds.
> Since there is no official Quenya, perhaps the world's Tolkien fans
> should elect an academy to set up an official Quenya, to finish the
> work in his spirit? Or should anyone be free to use his material to
> whatever end their spirits may pursue? After all he's dead and
> intellectual property applies no more.
>
> Personally I would be quite happy if I could foresee any chance that
> anyone would continue working with my stuff when I'm not able
> anymore. I've seen many epigoni, good and bad, after authors like
> Jack Vance and Robert E. Howard for example. But no matter good and
> bad, at least there is something. It is continued life in a way.
> Would it have pleased Tolkien if he had known that nobody would dare
> to touch his work in respect of him? I doubt it.
>
> LEF
>