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Re: Auxlangs and Orcs' Langs

From:John Cowan <cowan@...>
Date:Tuesday, March 16, 2004, 15:03
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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Michael Poxon <m.poxon@...>