Re: Tolkien & front rounded vowels (was: RE: [CONLANG] Fave Conlangs WAS: Silindion

--- In conlang@y..., Andreas Johansson <and_yo@H...> wrote:
> And Rosta wrote:
>
> >It's striking too how Quenya has the consonants of Finnish but
> >the vowels of Latin, not Finnish. So I guess Christian is correct.
> >
>
> Except the Cw and Cy series, which are definitely unfinnish!
In fact, I find all of Quenya's phonology to be much more reminiscent
of Latin than Finnish.  I'm glad about that... Finnish phonology allows
plenty of abominations like long vowels followed by consonant
clusters...  ::shudder::  And I won't even mention the blood-curdling
front rounded diphtongs!

The only Finnism in Quenya that comes to my mind is the syllable-final
<h>, which I find quite tolerable from an aesthetic point of view.

Quenya syllable structure is more restrictive than both Latin and
Finnish.  It seems Tolkien has taken great care to make every Quenya
sentence sound like a poem.  He did a good job IMHO.

It seems to me that Tolkien used Finnish mainly for the grammar
rather than for the phonology.


-- Christian Thalmann

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