Re: Creating words

Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> Another way is to apply a list like Swadesh not to the language
> itself, but from a protolanguage of it, and derive words by sound changes and
> semantic changes, like it happens in reality. Tolkien did that for instance
> (though I don't think he used the Swadesh list originally :)) ).

Actually, he created the illusion of doing that.  If you look at the
record (or recent postings on Elfling) you find that over his long life,
many words remained very stable while the etymologies changed out from
under.  For example, the Powers (or Gods) were always called "Valar",
but originally this was etymologically "the happy ones", whereas later
on it is a primitive word for them.  The protolanguage underlying
1915-Quenya has little or nothing to do with the protolanguage
underlying the Quenya of the L.R. period, though perhaps the
majority of individual Q words are either the same or very
similar.


In fact, Tolkien probably created his words mostly by intuitive
feel.  We even see a root carried over from his pseudo-Romance
language Naffarin to the utterly unrelated Elvish languages:
"a curiously predominant association in my languages, which is
always pushing its way in (a case of early fixation of individual
association, I suppose, which cannot now be got rid of)".

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