CHAT: Nur-ellen universes (was Re: Barukh "Susa'i" ben-Yohhanan?)

BP Jonsson wrote:

> OTOH I always thought that the Sindarin form "Melroch" sounds kinda
> Persian, so maybe it can pass in Hebrew too?
If some Jews managed to get into contact with Elves somehow ;-)

Well, in both of my Nur-ellen universes (yes, there are two [1], if not
more [2]), such a contact is not at all impossible.  In fact, Jews and
Elves are likely to experience similar fates in a world where both
exist, and could evolve strong friendly ties.  They'd have quite a lot
to talk about, and even their religions are not all that incompatible!
(Though I think that Elves would be quite disgusted about what was and
is going on in Israel.)  Perhaps I should throw some bits of Hebrew and
Yiddish into Nur-ellen...

[1] A brief description of the two Nur-ellen universes:

The first of these two universes is one where Tolkien's books contain
actual history.  In that world, Sindarin was indeed a natlang quite a
long time ago, and there are still a few Elves left over whose language
has evolved into Nur-ellen from Sindarin.

The second is more realistic.  It assumes that there have been "Elves"
in the past, but they were mere mortal humans, nevertheless with a
fascinating civilization that was advanced for their time.  There never
was a race of immortal beings, and the geography of the _Silmarillion_
and the _Lord of the Rings_ is entirely fictional.  These "Elves" lived
in Britain (and earlier, in large parts of continental western Europe,
being the same people known to archaeology as the bell-beaker folk)
before the Celtic invasion and are in fact the historic nucleus of those
Celtic and Germanic mythological tradition Tolkien re-created his Elves
from.

The languages of these people were not identical to Tolkien's languages,
but similar: the idea is that Tolkien found old handwritings containing
fragments of those old languages from which he attempted to reconstruct
them and ended up with Quenya and Sindarin.  In this second universe,
Nur-ellen is spoken in a few villages along the England-Wales border,
and is the modern descendent of the language which Tolkien reconstructed
as Sindarin.

There are quite a number of Elvish words in well-known languages.
For example, the name of the English capital, London, goes back, via
Latinized British _Londinium_, to Elvish _Lond Din_ "Quiet Haven"; and
the word "iron", which comes from an old Celtic word *_isarn_, can be
traced further back to an old Elvish word *_elsarn_ "star-stone" (which
was later obscured by _ang_).
I have started making up a list of such etymologies, but it is in a
rag-tag state and I don't have it at hand right now.

[2] As both of my Nur-ellen universes involve events that occured long
before the  Roman conquest of Britain, one could easily combine any of
them with the Brithenig universe (I prefer the second, "realistic" one),
such that Nur-ellen is spoken *there* as well!  If you want to,
Nur-ellen (what is it called in Brithenig?  Ylylig perhaps, from the
Nur-ellen word _el`l_ "Elf"?) could be in a much better shape *there*
than *here*, being still quite wide-spread in parts of Kemr.

> || Lenda lenda pellalenda pellatellenda cuivie aiya! ||
Nice!  _Gate gate parasamgate..._ in Quenya!  I recited this to a friend
who is into all sorts of mind-bending mysticism, and even though he
never
heard of Quenya before and I didn't tell him what it means, he could
translate it  back into Sanskrit on the spot.  The sound pattern is just
too characteristic.   The guy completely freaked out on it, commenting
that it was even more beautiful than the original!

Syld,
Joerg.