Re: Quenya Wikibook

Hallo!

On Tue, 27 Feb 2007 07:32:46 -0500, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> I think the message is simple.  We can extrapolate
> internally-consistent Elvish langs that agree with the attested
> xamples 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.
Yes.  The kind of criticism Hostetter levels at the "reconstructionists"
like Fauskanger or Salo is to some extent justified.  The snags to the
reconstructionist approach pointed out by Hostetter are real, and it is
for exactly these reasons that such reconstructions are not considered
legitimate scholarship among those scholars who work on real-world extinct
languages such as Hittite or Tocharian.

But the reconstructionists are aware of these problems (Salo, for instance,
at least *should* know - his professional interest is Tocharian), and make no
claims that their reconstructions are correct.  They are aware that those are
merely conjecture and in no way canonical.  Take a look at Fauskanger's web
site, Ardalambion ( http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/ ), for instance - the
forms he and others have reconstructed rather than extracted from canonical
material are carefully marked with asterisks.

> That doesn't diminish the fun of "speaking Quenya" or the value of the
> work done by the reconciliaTories in painstakingly researching JRRT's
> works and constructing the modern versions of his Elvish langs. It's
> just a question of truth in attribution.
Exactly.  There is a difference between "canonical" Elvish on one hand -
what hasn't been found in JRRT's legacy remains unknown - and "Neo-Quenya"
and "Neo-Sindarin" on the other.  I think the prefix "Neo-" makes it clear
enough that these languages are not canonical - no need to postulate a
stronger prefix such as "pseudo-", as long as the reconstruction work done
is linguistically informed (i. e. Neo-Sindarin words are built from Quenya
words by applying the known sound laws, unattested forms of attested words
are formed according to known paradigms, etc.) and not just high-handed
invention ex nihilo.  (Even the latter is not really illegitimate as long
as one makes clear that the language is not original Tolkienian Elvish,
but contains stuff that has been made up.)

There is a similar controvery about the attempts at the revival of Cornish;
the Cornish revivalists use similar methods as the reconstructionist
Quendianists, and besides there being different reconstructions of Cornish
("Common Cornish", "Unified Cornish", "Unified Cornish Revised", etc.),
there are scholars who say that revived Cornish is not true Cornish.

It is a matter of knowing which hat you are wearing - either you study
the actual work of Tolkien, in which case reconstructionist reconstruction
is illegitimate, or you try to develop the languages into languages that
can actually be used in practice, in which cases such reconstructions cannot
be avoided.  These are two different things that must always be kept apart.

... brought to you by the Weeping Elf

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