Re: Auxlangs and Orcs' Langs

Peter Bleackley scripsit:

> I wonder if Tolkien was having a dig at Esperanto in his description of
> the Black Speech. It was, after all, an artificial language created by
> Sauron to unify his disparate followers. While Esperanto claims to be
> a highly euphonious language, beauty is in the ear of the beholder,
> and if a (mainly) Romance vocabulary adapted to a Slavic phonology
> offended JRRT's ears, having true lovers of language (the elves) stop
> their ears with horror at the very sound of it would be a suitable
> way of expressing it.
Unlikely, I'd say.  JRRT liked Esperanto, thought the idea of an IAL
a good one (in "English and Welsh" he mentions as one of the external
virtues of Welsh the fact that it is not "in competition for the ruinous
honor" of being a global lingua franca), and particularly praised E-o
over its competition as being "the work of one man, and not a philologist"
(an artlangish auxlang, in fact).

As for the resemblances you point out, corruptio optimi pessima, I'd say.

--
John Cowan  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com  jcowan@reutershealth.com
"'My young friend, if you do not now, immediately and instantly, pull
as hard as ever you can, it is my opinion that your acquaintance in the
large-pattern leather ulster' (and by this he meant the Crocodile) 'will
jerk you into yonder limpid stream before you can say Jack Robinson.'"
        --the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake

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