Quenya Questions

A bit of web-browsing leads me to the conclusion that there is something
of a schism in the community of those studying Tolkein's languages.  On
the one hand you have those those who consider it a scholarly enterprise
of an archeological nature, whose end result is greater insight into
Tolkein's work, but with no hope of reconstructing any sort of complete,
usable language, and admitting no evidence that didn't come directly
from Tolkein's hand.  On the other side, you have those who are willing
to put the constraints of serious scholarship aside in order to make
assumptions based on little evidence, extrapolate wildly, and yield a
language that one can actually speak, and even extend.  In fact, much of
the "Sindarin" in Peter Jackson's films seems to have been created
expressly for those films, and is therefore obviously not a direct
creation of Tolkein's.

Is this accurate?  Is it a particularly divisive issue, or do many
people go back and forth between the two approaches depending on their
current short-term goals?

I seem to recall that there was a very similar issue in the realm of
Klingon scholarship, and it was pretty divisive, but the conservative
viewpoint upheld by the KLI seems to have mostly won out.  Probably this
result was helped by the fact that Dr. Okrand is still alive and able
and willing to contribute to the growth of the language.

-Mark

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